Fight for Your Life + Cannibal Apocalypse

FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE
(R, William Mishkin Motion Pictures, 86 mins., limited release date: Nov. 1977)

Looking back at the Video Nasties outrage via the two Severin Films DVD packages I belatedly reviewed, I find it to my eternal amusement just how seriously the watchdogs of public morale took some phenomenally low-rent, dreadful movies. Even from the clips on show in the trailer reels and documentaries, that something like Snuff could trigger extensive media pearl-clutching is boggling to my mind. It was all based on the fear of depravity and corruption in children and never about the quality of so many of these films being skid row deficient. God knows that if there were discussion of the filmmaking merits of Snuff or any handful of titles charged with obscenity, a real discussion would be held and the whole furor would be exposed for the self-righteous farce it was. The argument was never about the seams showing in these films, and similar seams in the parliamentary crackdown on Video Nasties were effectively quashed by a self-serving deference to "morality."

One of the movies I staved off watching for the longest time until those two write-ups were completed was Fight for Your Life, which is unique in the history of the DPP 72 in that it has endured as a craw-sticker since being denied cinema certification in England back in 1981. It has not been released on UK video ever since the pre-classified tapes were seized by police, and Stephen Thrower's enthusiasm for it has gone unheard in the age of DVD. In this case, as with I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, the combination of low-rent production and down-and-dirty subject matter has awarded the film a shelf life beneficial to any cult cinema gawker in the mood for the disreputable.

But unlike Meir Zarchi's bloodthirsty "take back the night" saga of retribution nor Wes Craven's implicating if frustrating knock on Ingmar Bergman, Fight for Your Life taps a grindhouse theme wholly uncommon to its vilified brethren: racial prejudice. Though director/producer/editor Robert A. Endelson and screenwriter/associate producer Straw Weisman ladle on child endangerment and sexual assault for that extra dose of queasiness, much of the harshness pertains to wall-to-wall verbal abuse and the demeaning reinforcement of stereotype at gunpoint. Whereas Krug Stillo felt compelled to demand Phyllis Stone piss herself in Craven's flick, Jessie Lee Kane (William Sanderson), the alpha psycho of Fight for Your Life, gets cross-country mileage out of the many ways the epithet "coon" can be used against the middle-class black Turner family.

Kane's particularly obsessed with breaking down the paterfamilias, reverend Ted Turner (Robert Judd). Though he bandies about "Deputy Dawg" and "Aunt Jemima" in regards to mother (Catherine Peppers) and granny (Lela Small), Kane's ire for "Martin Luther Coon" is fiery enough to demand Ted do a Stepin Fetchit shuffle, firing off bullets at his feet in the manner of a Wild West gangster. Ted, a devout Christian who sermonizes "the meek shall inherit the earth" almost every time at the pulpit, is even brutalized with his own good book by Kane, who tests the "turn the other cheek" philosophy to its depraved extremes. Kane's hard knock life is the source of some psychologically-deep impotence, which is how Ted and Grandma Turner dish out their own spiteful retorts in the fog of Kane's bigotry. In a more polished movie, a genuine battle of wills could emerge in the way Ted is enabled to act on his primitive rage only to push his virulent captor that one step further over the edge.

The only polish Fight for Your Life receives is from the fine folks at Blue Underground, who've remastered the film to a rather distressing sheen. I got the feeling that DVD is not the ideal way to view a movie like this, which cries out for thick grain, frequent projector stutters and a rowdy crowd willing to receive the pervasive invective for its ultimate reward. From its awkwardly-looped first scene, where a pimp dutifully shakes down one of his clientele for heroin, to the show-stopping duel between Kane and Ted, facilitated by a feeble police squad who undergo their own compromising of principle, Fight for Your Life is downtown gristmill fodder all the way.

As his behavior should make obvious, Jessie Lee Kane is indeed an extremely dangerous fugitive, who takes advantage of the police truck transporting him nearly getting fender bended by cold-cocking and then shooting the officer who decides to check on him. His accomplices on the run are the Hispanic thug Chino (Daniel Faraldo) and scar-faced Asian bogeyman Ling (Peter Yoshida), and the trio make off in said pimp's ‘76 Mercury on a violence-dotted run for the border. A liquor store robbery is witnessed by Corrie Turner (Yvonne Ross), Ted's daughter, whose captivity by the trio results in the ultimate appearance of these convicts at the Turner household.

Lt. "Rulebook" Reilly (David Cargill) commandeers one of the least-interesting manhunts ever, grating against the lax local jurisdiction of Captain Hamilton (Richard A. Rubin), while Kane and friends make themselves at home under the Turners' roof until sundown. Two family friends are sacrificed in the process, done in by the hulking Ling. Karen (Bonnie Martin), the white girlfriend of slain soldier son Val Turner (Ramon Saunders), is chased off a cliff while fleeing the rapist's pursuit of Ling, who then bludgeons preteen Floyd Turner's (Reginald Blythewood) best bud and blood brother Joey (David Dewlow), who also happens to be the son of Captain Hamilton.

Perfunctory and deadening rather than unpredictable and relentless, Fight for Your Life isn't as distressing as Last House on the Left or the similar invasion terrors of Straw Dogs and The Desperate Hours. A sequence in which Kane decides to "teach a lesson" to one of the Turner women with some rope and a tree peters out sans any truly disturbing lynching correlations, thus Endleson and Weisman fall back on the gang rape of poor Corrie as the breaking point for the family. The aforementioned beating of Ted with his Bible is presented in fast-motion POV that ridiculously undercuts the brutality of the moment. And the film's narrative momentum is so hokey that when the Turners pick up knives during one moment of convenient revolt, it also comes off an inconsequential despite further aggravation of the main baddie.

Robert Judd, whose only other acting credit was in Walter Hill's Crossroads (released in the same year Judd died), is the one relative unknown performer whose ascension to vengeance is natural enough to give them film a needed edge of vérité. But the main draw of Fight for Your Life is character actor William Sanderson in his screen debut as Jessie Lee Kane. In 1982, Sanderson's career picked up steam thanks to roles in Blade Runner, Raggedy Man and on TV's Newhart, but until then he was counted on to provide hillbilly menace in films like this and David Paulsen's Savage Weekend, filmed in 1976 but shelved for three years until The Cannon Group salvaged it. Sanderson's performance is equally as rough as Judd's if not more so, and Robert Endelson doesn't capitalize on those "sad eyes," to borrow a phrase which Granny uses to taunt Kane. There's more pathos in J.F. Sebastian's silent elevator ride to doom than there is any moment Kane grouses about his lost manhood.

There's also rougher justice meted out to Krug and Co. in Craven's Last House than there is to the criminals in Fight for Your Life. By the time the tables have turned for good, one of Kane's accomplices is shot in the groin and another flies out of a window to be impaled on a shard of glass. The basic purpose of these exploitation pictures is to watch cruelty reciprocated by the victims with rabble-rousing urgency followed by stone silence, yet between the rainbow coalition of hostility indoors and the worthlessness of the cops who arrive as Corrie is plainly being raped, Fight for Your Life is the kind of nihilism which indifferently shrugs it off by saying "You get what you pay for."

CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE
(R, Eurocopfilms/Almi Cinema 5, 96 mins, U.S. theatrical release date: Sept. 18, 1981)

Find some comfort food, improbable as it may seem, in a movie called Cannibal Apocalypse. Despite its title being censoriously taboo for the British government, this isn't another indigenous Italian melee of animal snuffing, barbaric torture and "are we the real savages?" philosophy. Antonio Margheriti begins in the jungle, but takes us instead to Vietnam with a passel of stock footage that eases us into the ensuing wartime mission. Sgt. Norman Hopper (John Saxon) comes upon an ambush, replete with surprise use of plastic explosive, but blasts his way out and locates a couple of POWs, including his hometown friend from Atlanta, GA, Charlie Bukowski (Giovanni Lombardo Radice). The captive soldiers, alas, have developed a taste for human flesh, and burly black prisoner Tony Thompson (Tony King) decides to take a nibble from Hopper's outstretched hand.

Such is the recurring nightmare/flashback Hopper endures in domestic life, and things get worse once Bukowski is granted a temporary leave from psychiatric hospice and tries in vain to rendezvous with his former superior. The rebuffed veteran decides on a matinee screening of From Hell to Victory only to suffer a lip-smacking relapse while observing a couple making out, necking the young woman quite literally. Fleeing the scene, trailed by a biker gang hankering for vigilante justice, Bukowski holes up in a flea market and takes arms against the marauders. Hopper is called to negotiate Bukowski's surrender, but he and his cannibalistic malady refuse to be contained much longer.

Perhaps the purest action director in the gut-bucket genre lorded over by Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei, Margheriti tempers the grisly chaos with energetic set pieces such as the opening 'Nam  attack and Bukowski's civilian battle, humming a twisted "Yankee Doodle Dandy" as he feasts on one of the bikers. Having gotten the most bang for his buck, Margheriti suitably deploys some top-notch FX work from Giannetto De Rossi (of Fulci's Zombie and The Beyond fame) as the virus circulates, with an infected nurse locking and chomping tongues with Hopper's blood analyst and another of the rabid survivors getting a hole shotgun blasted through his stomach. The way it is filmed, the camera panning the victim's face down to the open wound and then back up again, is the most indelible money shot I've ever seen in a proudly Italian gorefest.

Margheriti also borrows from Fulci the scriptwriting services of Dardano Sacchetti (in a movie full of Anglicized credits, his is "Jimmy Gould"), who tries to incorporate some vague biological rationale for the cannibalism as well as frame Hopper's torment within concerns of betrayal on account of his wife, TV news reporter Jane (Elizabeth Turner). It seems that Dr. Phil Mendez (Ramiro Oliveros) was a former beau of Jane's, and the good doctor even goes so far as to say "You should've married me instead." A tragic story of renewed love is paid off, despite wobbly characterization that has Hopper succumbing out of nowhere to the childish advances of the teenage tart next door, Mary (Cinzia De Carolis). This tryst is meant set up something more ironic for the last reel.

At least Johns Saxon and Morghen (Mr. Radice) command the screen no matter the war zones. Saxon was vocal about his soul-crushing disappointment towards the cannibal subgenre in a documentary included on Image‘s DVD (which I ridiculously reviewed on Epinions.com once upon a time), but it doesn't show in his performance. And while I prefer Dario Argento's Tenebre, in which Saxon was a mere supporting star, Saxon is credible despite the material. Radice, however, looks the part of a boyish case of shell shock rather uncannily and acts with crazed vigor. To rightly contrast their playing styles, just watch the scene where Hopper talks Bukowski (love that literate name) into deflating a tear gas canister with urine. Radice is no stranger to Video Nasties, thanks to appearances in Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park (he was also memorably drill killed in Fulci's City of the Living Dead, but that somehow escaped the Brits‘ attention).

Given the low-key plague scenario as well as the original Italian title being Apocalypse Domani (translation: "Apocalypse Tomorrow"), Cannibal Apocalypse tries to find some inspiration outside of George Romero, conjuring Cronenberg‘s Shivers & Rabid as well as Francis Ford Coppola. Margheriti is too pulpy a filmmaker to realize such a fascinating mash-up, but compared to Fight for Your Life and many of the sluggishly sleazy Video Nasties I'd just as soon forget, it's not a total detriment. If you want to read into it a particularly lurid translation of post-traumatic stress disorder, with electric saws grinding up human goulash in loving close-up and Saxon fitting himself back into his old Vietnam War uniform to accept his fate, you wouldn't be off-base. Personally, I embrace Cannibal Apocalypse for what it most resembles: a large pizza Margherita with double the cheese and tomato.

The Hollywood Knights

THE HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS
(R, Columbia Pictures, 91 mins., theatrical release date: May 16, 1980)

As long as there are cars and girls to be romanticized, there will always be a place for filmmakers to wax nostalgic about their high school nights spent cruising the metropolitan strip looking for action and adventure. The benchmark example remains George Lucas' American Graffiti, which was both entertaining and expressionistic in following four Modesto seniors' last tastes of adolescent freedom. We will need sewers, too, which is appropriate in the case of THE HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS. 

Having built enough of a fan base among after-hours HBO aficionados and suckers for low-hanging slapstick, Columbia/Tri-Star overcame music licensing issues for The Hollywood Knights' initial DVD release in 2000. That Universal Studios managed to put Bob Zemeckis' I Wanna Hold Your Hand on plastic four years after seems a grave injustice.

Writer/director Floyd Mutrux pleads naiveté several times in the audio commentary track (exclusive to the DVD, not on the Blu-Ray release) when he shares ideas that are blatant cribs from American Graffiti and its ilk, from the disc jockey-as-Greek chorus device to the peeping tomfoolery of horn dogs from on high to the sobering depiction of society's fall from grace after the 1950s. But what Mutrux hasn't done with The Hollywood Knights is allow it Lucas' sense of levity, nor turned the period setting into a kitschy cartoon a la Grease, nor went for John Landis' droll burlesque which made Animal House its own trendsetter.

Instead, The Hollywood Knights, cult following be damned, is exactly what it is to the naked eye: the inbred bastard offspring of all three established blockbusters. And in 1980, too, where comedy fans could look forward to Airplane! and Used Cars and The Blues Brothers and Caddyshack and Stir Crazy and 9 to 5 and Private Benjamin. In what stunted brain does The Hollywood Knights share a pedestal with these films, let alone its exalted forebears?

Aping George Lucas' patchwork plotting but adding the kind of gratuitous vulgarity which made it more pliant to the easily amused, Mutrux comes nowhere near close to capturing the spirit of ‘65. He clearly wishes he it were ‘56 instead. The three years of history that existed between Lucas and Mutrux's respective settings doesn't exist, and the soundtrack doesn't even scratch the surface of what I'd imagine listening to the radio in 1965 would be. For one, the only hit song of that year heard in The Hollywood Knights is "Wooly Bully," which was the Year-End #1 song of 1965 and also heard in More American Graffiti. Except for a couple nods to The Supremes, there's little of the Motown sound. No British Invasion at all, no Dylan or McGuire, no Tom Jones, no Righteous Brothers, not even the deathless likes of "I Got You Babe," "I Got You (I Feel Good), "(What a) Wonderful World," "Hang on Sloopy," or even "The Name Game."

He does use "Little Darling" by The Diamonds, in the exact same way American Graffiti did. Maybe Mutrux should've set it in 1964 given that "Baby Love," "Rag Doll," "Goin' Out of My Head," and an a cappella rendition of "Under the Boardwalk" represent the lion's share of a single year's chartbusters. The point is that Mutrux could care less about the ostensible year this takes place in, and that I might be stalling from having to describe the many other ways this movie bombs.

The gist of the movie is that the title posse are into cars and girls, which means that the news of their beloved hangout, a drive-in diner named Tubby's, being closed the day after Halloween at the behest of the Beverly Hills Residents Association will not do. Mutrux doesn't even do thing one with the possibilities of October 31. Where are the costume parties, trick-or-treaters, jack o'-lanterns, fucking anything to make me believe in Halloween?!

Anyway, Tubby's is set to be torn down by the richies, so The Hollywood Knights, a completely anonymous bunch led by the wannabe mythical Newbomb Turk, decide to pull a few pranks at various societal gatherings in between pit stops at their beloved diner and other negligible run-ins with ladies, lawmen and lame-os. Because none of these jokers has any conceivable personality, their appeal lives and dies with their front man. As played by Robert Wuhl in his first movie, Newbomb Turk is as boring as he is boorish. You'd never guess he would be ready for prime time someday (cf: Arli$$) based on Mutrux's film, where Wuhl is the very poor man's John Belushi (lesser than John DiSanti from 1979's King Frat) crossed with an equally broke schmuck's Bill Murray (he's not even Steve Guttenberg).

Turk's most inspired act of sabotage is to kidnap an obese nerd (Stuart Pankin) and, in the place of the scheduled magic act during a pep rally, scream and fart a rendition of "Volare." And Wuhl's not even the least bit funny doing that. It's as if he‘s trying too hard at something Belushi could cruise with. Not that Mutrux writes anything for Wuhl on the level of "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!" The sophomoric comedy is mostly visual, and Mutrux bungles every one of them, including several gags that would thrive in the late 1990s under better directors. Mutrux even rips off National Lampoon magazine's own high school satire during the aforementioned rally. And Turk's other fast ones involve the oldest of standbys, from flaming dog doo to peeing in the punch to ogling/spying on numerous girls to what we will call Chekhov's Pie Wagon.

"But wait, Johnny! What about Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer, who are clearly the stars of this movie based on the DVD cover art?"

I'd pity whoever would say that, because neither of them are in the film for even a quarter of the time as Robert Wuhl is. They do appear onscreen together in a pitiful clone of the Ronny Howard/Cindy Williams subplot from American Graffiti, in which Danza's Duke chafes at Pfeiffer's Suzie Q wanting to escape the boring life of a car hop for a shot at acting. It's as obligatory as their names, as is another Knight's plight (Gary Graham's Jimmy) concerning his one-way ticket to Vietnam. Given how Pfeiffer was Mutrux's choice of leading lady when he was in talks to direct Urban Cowboy, it's astonishing how little she has to do with the movie.

Fran Drescher makes more of an impression than Pfeiffer, but this is the same year she starred in Gorp. So her main function is to prattle away with her two girlfriends while they undress in the unwanted company of the Knights. Although the two attempt to get it on later in the flick, it was never clear if Drescher's Sally is Turk's squeeze. Anyway, the future Bobbi Flekman is just as squandered here as Pfeiffer is.

Am I missing something? Well, Gailard Sartain and Sandy Helberg (another one who went on to Spinal Tap? And Joyce Hyser is in this, too?!) are incompetent patrolmen who incur the wrath of the Hollywood Knights by towing the car belonging to Turk's brother. Leigh French and Richard Schaal are two of the evil hoi polloi who can't keep from engaging in illicit sex in broad nighttime. Did I mention that the Knights are like the T-Birds crossed with the Delta Tau Chi fraternity except I can't remember a single one besides the three who are the most prominently hackneyed?

The Hollywood Knights is non-stop raunchy exploitation too cluttered and clumsy to enjoy on a basic level. It can't even climax with a convincing bang like Animal House given how tasteless it is even looking past the puerile humor, because it is such an unabashed rip-off of American Graffiti. Funny that Columbia Pictures were one of the many big studios who spurned George Lucas on his way to the top, only to greenlight this travesty. "And here I sit, sucking on brown Popsicles."

Cannon Fodder: The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood

THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES HOLLYWOOD
(R, Cannon Films, 88 mins., theatrical release date: June 4, 1980)

[Morgan Spurlock, eat your heart out on a sesame seed bun with special sauce. Five movies into my retrospective series Cannon Fodder and I can feel my brain turning into porridge. The goal is to write at least five more reviews, give or take Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films, but this is now officially the masochistic thing I've ever done!]

Ever heard the Cinderella story about the Dutch ex-secretary who became the belle of the balls?

Before Heidi Fleiss, there was Xaviera Hollander, the infamous "Happy Hooker" who came to manage her own brothel after becoming the go-to prostitute of late 1960s New York. In the wake of her deportation to Toronto, Hollander released an autobiography which was voraciously frank about her many sexcapades. She then became an advice columnist for Penthouse ("Call Me Madam") for roughly three decades, before finally spending her golden years in Amsterdam running a bed-and-breakfast.

The real life story of Hollander is so fascinatingly risqué and free-spirited that when The Happy Hooker became a bestseller, it was only natural that enterprising film producers wanted to option her tell-all for show business. It took one failed X-rated effort from Larry Spangler, notoriously sued by both Hollander and the Disney empire (listen to the 42nd Street Forever Volume 3 DVD commentary on The Life and Times of Xaveria Hollander), before there was a legitimate version of The Happy Hooker for the cinemas, released in 1975 and starring Lynn Redgrave in the title role.

Incidentally, the same year saw the actual Xaveria Hollander make her screen debut in Al Waxman's My Pleasure Is My Business, which, based on the write-up from Canuxploitation, seemed to inform the future sequels to The Happy Hooker. The first, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, borrowed the thread of Waxman's film, wherein a prudish government latches onto Hollander as a scapegoat for their own indiscretions. Hollander proves herself a heroic "liberator" when the CIA coerces her into putting the make on a sheik, but much of what has come before is reliably Seventies broad comedy light on coherence but big on T&A.

You can understand why Lynn Redgrave wouldn't be interested in reprising her role, so Joey Heatherton filled in and wound up fitting in with the renewed emphasis on trash. But then came The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, which recast Xaviera Hollander for a second time and once again landed a performer who bore no physical resemblance to either Hollander or her previous onscreen avatars. She was Martine Beswick, best known for her appearances in two Connery-era 007 vehicles (From Russia with Love, Thunderball) as well as wrestling Raquel Welch, the both of them immortally clad in animal fur underwear, in One Million Years B.C. (advanced studies include the Spaghetti western A Bullet for the General and Oliver Stone's debut oddity Seizure).

Happy Hooker ‘80 also marked a more important baton-passing than the presence of Beswick, as Cannon Films were under new ownership by this point. Yes, Golan-Globus took time out from the teenage soft-porn of Boaz Davidson's Lemon Popsicle "saga" to renew Cannon's flagship series of adults-only erotica. Not that the result was any less juvenile.

The perverse thing about early '80s sex comedies was that they didn't become trendy again until they were targeted specifically at teenagers. Suddenly, the older generation passed down their well-worn memories of coitus interruptus and other related shenanigans to a gullible new demographic and were reaping fool's gold in the process. The antics of Porky's and its subsequent cash-ins were already tapped dry by the time The Hollywood Knights came right out and ripped off both American Graffiti and Animal House in one fell swoop, but that sure didn't matter once the inundation of Privates and Virgins and Classes took hold.

Take Private School for example, in which the horndogs were so desperate they resorted to drag costumes to enter the girls' dormitory. Nowadays, the scene is remembered purely for Betsy Russell's striptease more than any comedic genius on part of the writers and director. The benchmark for this type of cross-dressing farce is, of course, Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon went incognito as girlie musicians so they wouldn't be offed by gangsters. When Billy Wilder directed Some Like It Hot back in the era of the Hays Code, this contrivance was a lot less sniggering and relied on joint sophistication in performance, dialogue, cinematography, and wardrobe/make-up to make the jokes come naturally. The magic would later be diluted by bumbling opportunists who bought into the whole "girls as pastries" credo without so much as a lick of authentic talent.

The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, released roughly two years before Porky's, rehashes the same shtick, although Jack's own son, Chris Lemmon, dodges that bullet. Here, aged hams Adam West and Richard Deacon are forced into posing as ladies due to a practical joke which has left them, to pilfer another cliché, sans clothing. They are amorously pursued by a drunken coot who rides the elevator and spurs one of them into throwing an ill-fated punch. The scenario plays out as more embarrassing for West and Deacon, though, than for their characters, because the filmmakers have severely let them down.

That's essentially what this movie is: 85 minutes of dignity-damaging disappointments. And those three Ds are heavier than any of the breasts on show, including Martine Beswick's.

Full disclosure: I fell asleep halfway through watching this movie the first time around. In retrospect, I should've stopped there. When a movie peaks early with a cameo by Dick "I'm more than just a goddamn porn name" Miller as a randy policeman whom the Knapp Commission couldn't tame, there's really nowhere left to go but Dreamland. I can just imagine Dick Miller playing the hippie Jesus of The Apple, the land-grubbing Venarius from Enter the Ninja (sorry, Christopher George) and the cackling pharmacy clerk from The Last American Virgin, and I'm laughing. Boy, am I laughing.

I instead must wake up to find Phil Silvers in a gold wheelchair reciting lines like "Let bygones be spilled milk" as if they were off cue. Sgt. Bilko, missing in action. Seriously, my Dick Miller parallel universe is way more hilarious and fantastical than anything in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.

Silvers plays W.B. Warkoff (geddit?), the ass-slapping mogul from the salad days of Robert Lippert with his eyes on translating Xaviera Hollander's bestseller into blockbuster cinema. Good luck picturing that based on the ensuing dullness.

Our Madam intercepts the news and flies off to Tinseltown to ensure they don't make a botch of her story in the same manner as...well, you know who.

She meets with unscrupulous producers Lionel Lamely (Mr. West) and Joseph Rottman (Mr. Deacon), the former Playboy-ing (boing?) his way into Hollander's sensual graces despite conniving with a bitchy actress to sabotage the project. Madam is mistaken for a whore, and instead pairs off with idealistic Robby Rottman (Lemmon Popsicle!) to go indie. She amasses a budget with a little help from her stable of sultries, but that dastardly Warkoff has a few more tricks up his sleeve.

Will the film ever get made?

Can Xaviera deliver to it Warkoff in time for premiere night and collect the $5 million promised her?

Will you be amazed when a packed house doesn't audibly groan in unison after watching a preview of The Apple?

Shall I stop right now and focus on something else, like Revenge of the Ninja or Making the Grade?

Find out next time whether or not Cannon continues to blow  Same bad-time, same bad-channel. Or at least until we all forget to remember the phrase "Bouncy, bouncy."

 

Cannon Fodder: The Apple (1980)

THE APPLE
(PG, Cannon Films, 86 mins., theatrical release date: November 21, 1980)

[Welcome to Cannon Fodder, in which I endure a handful of "classics" from the Golan-Globus production team in advance of my review of Mark Hartley's Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. I will tackle as many different movies from various points in the duo's timeline, from the early success of Operation Thunderbolt to the infamous Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. We begin with one of the early Cannon efforts, and the first of many in the "so bad it's good" legacy they've achieved. "It's an actual, actual, actual desire..."]

I broke down 40 minutes into The Apple, when Barbarella's vocally-deficient kid sister tried to belt a raucous anthem about America's need for "speeeeeeeeeeed." My palate needed cleansing, therefore I went to YouTube and pulled up a popular clip from Teen Witch.

You know what I'm talking about...

"Top That," with its Beastly Boys and pathetic ideal of adolescent cool, is still a better number than anything in The Apple.

I shouldn't have to write a review on The Apple. The comparison should speak for itself, but The Apple is low-hanging fruit in a sequined thong.

Menahem (remember to pronounce it as Mun-Ackum) Golan and Yoram Globus had just bought Cannon Films at this time, and it looks like they wasted few precious moments cementing their legacy as the ghastliest, gaudiest production company to ever schmuck up the cinemas.

The story was originally conceived as an epic Hebrew musical theater production by Coby and Iris Recht. Overhauled by Golan himself as writer/director, The Apple ended up another in the late 1970s spate of opulent disco cash-ins, released the same year as Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music. Disco Demolition Night was a year old by the time The Apple played, and with the exception of Olivia Newton-John's songs from Xanadu, this trio of turkeys drove America further into the arms of AOR. We as a nation went from the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever to Hi Infidelity so capriciously.

Obviously, it didn't help that the premiere screening of The Apple at the El Capitan turned into Comiskey Park 2. Audience members who were given complimentary vinyl versions of the soundtrack album eventually started hurling them at the screen. Menahem Golan was apparently suicidal over the movie's poor reception back in Europe, but recovered soon enough so that the world was given such questionable gifts to film-going as Death Wish II, The Last American Virgin and his own Enter the Ninja.

To quote the main villain of The Apple, "Nostalgia is always dangerous." What better explanation is there for why The (Rotten) Apple has rode such a wave of retroactive awe that it washed up in my shores?

Set a decade after the Orwellian boiling point that was 1984, The Apple pillages from established junk culture in both popular music and movie musicals yet harbors loftier ambitions beyond its cavalcade of gold lamé, vampire teeth and repeated crimes against the earlobe.

In a future where pop music rules society, the 1994 Worldvision Song Contest is the stage for an Old Testament-copped struggle between good vs. evil. The latter is represented by Satanic agent Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) and his assistant Shake (Ray Shell, the Meshach Taylor of his era), as well as their hedonistic star singers Dandi & Pandi (Alan Love, Grace Kennedy). Opposing this fey foursome are Alphie & Bibi (George Gilmour, Catherine Mary Stewart), lovey-dovey folkies from Moose Jaw, Canada. After nearly causing an upset which Mr. Boogalow and Shake manage to suppress, these beaten babes are enticed to join Boogalow's circus of glam and ham. Alphie is deterred by apparitions of Eden-style temptation as he tries to sign the contract, but Bibi bites easy and hard, becoming Boogalow's latest protégé and driving Alphie to destitution.

As the mindless masses fall under the spell of Boogalow International Music and their pop-rock propaganda, Alphie soon finds salvation in a commune of hippies (led by Joss Ackland in a role more worthy of regret than De Nomolos from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) and is joined by lapsed disco dolly Bibi. When Mr. Boogalow tracks them down and demands Bibi's arrest for reneging on her contract, a power greater than the Devil himself arrives in a gold Rolls ("Marc Almond! No?! BOOO!!!") to take the teens to their final destination.

Catherine Mary Stewart, looking in the film for all the world like a young Kelly Clarkson (while the equally underperforming Gilmour, in his only credit, arrives as Warren Beatty), talked about how Golan aspired to be "better than Ken Russell," but The Apple isn't so much Tommy. For all its kitsch, Golan never once has Stewart writhe sensually in a flood of creamed vegetables. No, it's apt to see The Apple instead as a Godspell-Phantom of the Paradise hybrid knock-off with more transvestites than The Rocky Horror Picture Show and less infectious tunes.

A friend of mine who's married to an online critic (who, incidentally, gave this film a sincere rave, the lunatic) knows musician friends who bought The Apple as industry satire, mocking a machine so prefab and crass that the only way out is through unwavering integrity and a pinch of divine intervention. While I see things in The Apple which could support their enthusiasm, there are more dead-bang jokes in Phantom of the Paradise and This Is Spinal Tap. The height of intentional wit in The Apple is to parachute in Miriam Margolyes as Alphie's Bubbe-esque landlady, a bit of comic relief that cannot light the menorah once followed by the infamous "National Bim Hour" montage, a fitting prelude to the hospital dance-a-thon in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

More than any Biblical pretense or bizness lampoonery, what The Apple is really about is, naturally, music. This 86-minute film has about an hour's worth of production numbers, songs written exclusively for the film by musician Coby Recht and lyricists Iris Yotvat & George S. Clinton, the latter a Cannon employee not to be confused with the leader of Parliament/Funkadelic. Nigel Lythgoe choreographed the dance moves, and would go on to fulfill one of The Apple's half-baked prophecies as executive producer of American Idol.

Unfortunately, every moment in which The Apple breaks into song-and-dance stops the movie cold. Like Robert Christgau reviewing David Bowie's over-the-top singing on Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), if the awfulness of the music here is supposed to be a joke, it's not worth the pain. Lyrics are awkwardly crammed into subpar melodies, for one. Aside from the futility to make a hook out of the phrase "Life is nothing but show business in 1994," the opening number "(Do the) BIM" has a chorus constantly drilled into your skull which threatens that "BIM's on the way." I heard "BIM's the only way," although they could have been also singing "BIM's Yahweh." The point is there are tons more non-rhyming, repetitive blunders meant to condescend to refugees of the current vapid pop scene.

The music of The Apple is processed late 1970s cheese all the way ("Hey, hey, hey!!!"), flavorless slices of imitation Supertramp, Bonnie Tyler and The Carpenters (where's Paul "Swan" Williams when you really need him?) to garnish your Bim Burger (I'm not making that up, there is an actual restaurant in the movie which sells those). The Karen & Richard connection applies to Alphie & Bibi, whose own showcase songs are no less cringe-inducing than Boogelow's blooze. Their utopian schmaltzfest "(Love) The Universal Melody" doesn't convince at the start, but the duo's nadir is the mopey rock ballad "Cry for Me" ("Where has all the pity gone?"), a song which makes REO Speedwagon sound like Big Brother & The Holding Company.

There is a weird novelty to a couple of these abortions, it must be said. Never has a synthetic doo-wop duet (call it "Since I Don't Have ‘Since I Don't Have You' ") been voiced by a deathless Roger Daltrey clone and the dim ingénue he has just drugged. Never has a barnacle of a cod reggae song been mangled by a thick-accented Machiavellian who gloats into the ear of his pretty puppet. And if you wanted something to put the "o" in solo but were just too bashful to admit you owned "More, More, More" by the Andrea True Connection, well, The Apple has another thing "Coming." 

The Apple is one of those movies impossible to NOT make sound like a majestic monument of manure. This is a film in which the heroine is allowed the easiest possible escape all because Pandi has fucked the BIM away (and is subsequently slapped by the sissy black guy). One where an extra with a hoser accent yells at the heroes to "Go back to Moose Jaw!" One in which you could deduce major penis envy from its creator stemming from being denied entry into Studio 54. But given the combined non-efforts of the terrible music, the ridiculous dancing (BIM's prime directive is to pull no punches against the oxygen) and Menahem Golan's pedestrian sense of style, my first viewing of this was arduous.

It only got worse the second time I watched.

My nutty suspicion about the Israelis of Cannon is that as filmmakers, they were such fine producers. I will elaborate further as I go along, but suffice to say that Golan is genuine in his lack of finesse. The Apple is over rather quickly and has a sliver of showmanship important to the success of any musical, but there are Italian Road Warrior wannabes which are filmed more proficiently and look more believably dystopian.

And hippies, Mr. Golan? Seriously?!

 

Used Cars

USED CARS
(R, Columbia Pictures, 113 mins., theatrical release date: July 11, 1980)

If I told you about a movie which was from the creators of Back to the Future, with Steven Spielberg as executive producer alongside maverick story writer John Milius, and starring Kurt Russell in one of his first major breakaways from his Disney child star past, the unspoken assumption would be of a prestige picture so massive that Tom Hanks himself would've hopped in the magical DeLorean to covet it if given half a chance. Alas, the Academy Awards weren't quick to acknowledge the result of such a lofty-sounding collaboration, which turned out to be the 1980 cult film USED CARS, a scrappy but satirically-blessed comedy in the rude, crude model of Slap Shot, Animal House and Caddyshack. A screwball comedy with a liberal dose of T&A and roiling patriotic pessimism from the man who later gave us Forrest Gump. Go figure!

Remember Daffy Duck's sing-songy disdain of "honesty in business affairs" from Quackbusters? Well, here's a feature-length, live action extension of that scoffing attitude, with enough double talk and dirty deeds to forge the establishment of a whole new colony. It's the tale of two dodgy motor salesman so full of B.S. that they each, naturally, have political aspirations. On the one middle finger, you've got Rudy Russo (Russell), who wheels and deals at the disreputable New Deal Used Cars lot owned by Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden), a paternal but ailing old gent who disapproves of Rudy's conniving but prefers those to the schemes of his twin brother Roy (Warden again), who runs the Auto Emporium across the way. Rudy is ten grand behind on buying a seat in the Arizona senate for grafts and gratification, whereas Roy has bribed the mayor in an attempt to advance the construction of a highway overpass which will cut a swath in his sibling's business.

Impatiently, Roy decides to stir Luke into a fatal stroke with the aid of demolition man Mickey (Michael Talbott). After a chrome-plated funeral for Luke in the driver's seat of an Edsel, Rudy and his associates concoct an excuse to prevent Roy from seizing the property, namely that Luke has driven to Miami Beach for some R&R. This gives them free reign to start jamming television broadcasts and hiring strippers (including Hill Street Blues star/future filmmaker Betty Thomas) to boost their flagging sales, but Roy is hardly deterred. Rudy, meanwhile, develops guilt when Luke's long-lost daughter Barbara (Deborah Harmon) arrives for a go-nowhere reconciliation with her pappy and a budding romance with Rudy.

But first there's both a football game and a presidential address to sabotage with the assistance of Michael "Lenny" McKean and David "Squiggy" Lander as electronics wizzes Freddie & Eddie, the latter boastful of his DIY $12.95 pacemaker for the former. In the midst of a colorful cast of character actors (watch out for Al Lewis, Dub Taylor, Alfonso Arau, and Dick friggin' Miller) as well as Kurt Russell, both these moments as well as several others are duly stolen by Gerrit Graham in a typically offbeat, outlandish supporting role as Rudy's right-hand man Jeff. Superstitious to the point of self-loathing, he has an FCC-violating meltdown on the first go when posing in front of "a red chariot to take my ass straight to Hell!" And that's before he gets hopped up on valiums and decked out in cowboy garb as Marshal Lucky for an orgy of shotgun and dynamite destruction which even Jimmy Carter hears with unmistakable clarity.

Not to diminish Russell's rakish charms, which were as plain as plaid even before his string of Carpenter classics, or the brazen villainy of Warden as Roy L. Fuchs, but Graham is in top form for the many set pieces he's called on to carry. When a down-and-out Rudy wagers his life savings on the opposite team in a football match, Jeff (sym)pathetically springs into action to turn the odds against himself, spilling every salt shaker and opening up every umbrella within reach ("Is there a black cat in the house? How about a ladder?"). In a ploy to guilt trip a bulky family man into driving off in a pre-owned Gran Torino station wagon, he feigns the death of beagle mascot Toby ("I raised him from a puppy!"). And it's Jeff who holds the fate of New Deal Used Cars when Roy finally comes within crushing distance of his competitors. In short, Gerrit Graham makes every moment he's in a joyride.

Robert Zemeckis, scripting with occasional partner and producer Bob Gale, would go on to helm two more decade-defining comedies, including the masterful Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but even within the confines of a rare R-rated romp such as this, the esteemed Spielberg protégé gets a surprising amount of mileage from perceivably junky materials. The aforementioned Marshal Lucky commercial provokes some hysterical impromptu reactions from Graham, Warden and Russell, who distracts the unaware Harmon with a ridiculously prolonged kiss. There is a memorable gag which deploys a cadaver pre-Weekend at Bernie's as well as an action-packed finale where 250 cars are piloted by drivers ed students, with a chain-whipping Roy hot on their trail. Credit is especially due to film editor and Spielberg stableman Michael Kahn, who is expertly fluid in making a two-hour trip.

But at the center of it all is Russell, one of those boisterously funny gentlemen who can perk up many a commentary track (including the one he shares with Zemeckis and Gale on this film's DVD/BD releases), but whose CV in hindsight is more action and drama-oriented. Embracing the profane rat-a-tat dialogue and cocky duplicity with an élan akin to freedom, you wonder why he as well as Zemeckis haven't returned to that embellished form of japery in so long. Used Cars is the kind of movie whose opening montage of a lemon being twisted into a cherry (a twist of the pliers here, a wad of bubblegum there, don't forget that store-bought spray of factory freshness) pretty much sums up the talents of its makers. It's one of the funniest films of its era. Trust me.

Boutique label Twilight Time, known for their limited-to-3000-copies pressings of various catalog titles, ported over this one from Sony and retained several of the original DVD extras, namely the outtakes reel, vintage radio/TV adverts (see Russell cameo in a plug for the real life Mesa Chrysler lot which doubled as Roy Fuchs' Auto Emporium) and that indispensable three-man commentary track, in which the participants are stunned that Columbia Pictures let them make this movie, although their marketing wing ultimately proved ineffectual. Exclusive to this edition are an expanded photo gallery, an original theatrical trailer and two isolated score tracks, including one which restores several alternate, grandiose music cues from an unaccredited Ernest Gold.