Enchantéd, Pt. VIII: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Enchantéd: A Retrospective Tribute to Diane Franklin

VIII. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

(PG, Orion Pictures)

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By the year 2688, Earth's civilization will have finally reached Utopia. Clean air, clean water, and even clean dirt. Bowling averages will reach an all-time high while mini-golf scores plummet, but everyone will agree that our planet owns the monopoly on waterslides. Ironically, the teller of such fortunes is George Carlin as Rufus, a native of this future paradise who doesn't pause to explain why bowling and golf are not officially sports. For as we all know, you have to rent the shoes from the lanes and golf is as boring as watching flies f…

…forget it. The point is that this New World Order would not exist had the two philosophers from San Dimas, CA who founded it flunked their history exam in a most heinous development.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is the sole blockbuster movie in Diane Franklin's pocket (for those of you who didn't recognize her the first time, myself included, she's the blue belle on the left of the late Mr. Carlin), but we've reached the turning point where our peerless 1980s innamorata suddenly becomes much less visible than ever before. Franklin has less than 10 minutes of screen time here, a dispiriting realization compared to the twin peaks of Better Off Dead and TerrorVision. Also, we've come full circle as her function in Bill & Ted is basically a more sophisticated version of the "babe" persona introduced in The Last American Virgin.

At least in Second Time Lucky (which is as close to a Bill & Ted movie tailored for Diane as you'll ever see) and Better Off Dead, her glorified love interests were given ample breathing room as characters. This is strictly square one.

Common knowledge tells us that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was completed in 1987, when then-Ms. Franklin was still a working actress. The film was originally produced for Dino De Laurentiis, who gave the world Amityville II: The Possession, but his DEG distribution label was in the red. In stepped Orion Pictures and Nelson Entertainment, formerly Embassy Pictures, to give the film a proper push theatrically. After a few post-production tweaks, mainly to change the setting from 1987 to 1988 (there was also an alternate "prom" ending which got dumped), it opened in February of 1989 and spawned a most excellent franchise which is currently being groomed for a third entry.

Another well-known fact: 1991's Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey replaced both Diane Franklin (Princess Joanna) and co-star Kimberley LaBelle/Kates (Princess Elizabeth) with ‘90s starlet Sarah Trigger, who was born with her English accent, and Annette Azcuy.

And yet, after Diane Franklin spent over a decade transitioning to domestic life, her own daughter Olivia DeLaurentis made a short film in 2011 called Humanized in which she subconsciously named her character Alexis Winters. Betcha didn't know that!

So while The Last American Virgin and Better Off Dead vie eternally for cult supremacy in Diane's canon (seriously, where's the love for Summer Girl and/or TerrorVision?), Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure became a legit phenomenon, spun-off into cartoon series, breakfast cereals, video games, and action figures. Better that than having an abortion clinic board game or a plush version of Ricky Smith.

Although if it were Charles De Mar ("This is pure snow!" he'd say after you pull his string), I'd sincerely consider it.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure introduces its characters in way that suggests a sketch comic parody of Back to the Future starring the Spicoli Brothers. We get the over-juiced speaker catching fire, the "we're late for school" epiphany and their shaming by the school's authority figures. Unlike Marty McFly, though, they haven't the ability to get near a tune nor the wherewithal to attract girlfriends. Calling themselves Wyld Stallyns, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) don't even share the same train of thought, pondering a chicken-and-egg debate over whether their fame rests on Eddie Van Halen's tutelage or a bitchin' music video, skirting the obvious fact that they should actually learn some basic chords so that they approach even Link Wray-level proficiency.

Bill & Ted are just as clueless scholastically as they are musically; to them, Joan of Arc is "Noah's wife" and [Julius] Caesar is "a salad-dressing dude." The fate of the world is in doubt due to their consistent F marks in history class, for Ted's police captain father (Hal Landon Jr.) is one step away from sending his son off to a military academy (apparently in "Alaska," according to the ditzy Ted). Rufus is beamed into the present to act as emissary and salvation, materializing from out of the sky via a time-traveling phone booth and into the parking lot of the local Circle K.

Thanks to a freak accident during a test run of the device, it also rains Napoleon Bonaparte (Terry Camilleri), fresh from Austria 1805. Having returned at Ted's home, the duo place the discombobulated general under the care of Ted's older brother Deacon (Frazier Bain) as they embark on their manifest destiny: to travel back to the many time periods their history professor Mr. Ryan (Bernie Casey of Cleopatra Jones and Revenge of the Nerds) has outlined on their final and collect various iconic figures to give their own testimonials.

Looking back at the movie in context of Diane Franklin's decade-spanning exposure, its clear how far we've come from The Last American Virgin to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Whereas the trio of horny teens in Boaz Davidson's film required some major liberties to accept as tight-knit friends given their conflicting personalities, Bill & Ted are truly dudes of a feather, the ensuing comedy amiable in the best possible way. There is a pleasing absence of malice to the way the duo interact with the world, and even the introduction of an Oedipal complex in the lissome form of Bill's trophy stepmother Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton, graced with a humorous pout) is hardly catastrophic. Whereas the chauvinistic triad of that 1982 film would no doubt cry "Slut!" upon sight of Missy's cleavage, the worst that happens here is Ted's innocent razzing of his confused best friend ("Remember when I asked her to the prom?" "Shut up, Ted!!!").

As based on characters developed for the improvisational comedy stage, writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon (see if you can guess which scene they cameo in) get a lot of mileage out of the duo's vibrant lingo, one which combines the refined with the lowbrow. Bill refers to his "distinguished colleague" Ted in failing to bluff his way into convincing Mr. Ryan to go easy on them. Also there's Ted's priceless reaction upon seeing their future doppelgangers sing the praises of Rufus: "Bill...Strange things are afoot at the Circle K." The boys mangle the pronunciation of Socrates ("So-Crates"), tempt another ancient figure with a Twinkie and demonstrate their fullest knowledge of George Washington by referring to the Hall of Presidents exhibit at Disney World. And they call each other "Fag!" after a perfectly rational bro hug, which is hardly cause for alarm since they giddily resume japing.

These idiot savants wouldn't be half as charming, however, were it not for the serendipitous casting/chemistry of Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. Winter, previously a bit player in Death Wish 3 and The Lost Boys (and currently a documentary director whom I previously spotlighted), resembles a curly-haired, midriff-baring goof on Emilio Estevez. More self-assured than the shaggy Ted, a cigar-chomping Bill tries to school his dopey bud on the art of the "poker face" during a high-stakes game with Billy the Kid (Dan Shor of Wise Blood and Tron), only to crack hilariously when he finds three aces in his hand. And Reeves, in his star-making role following River's Edge and the 1986 Babes in Toyland, nails down the elastic body language and dazed reaction shots to turn his comparatively more childish personality into a comical treasure.

Ted is the designated "ladies' man" of the team, demonstrated by their arrival in medieval London where they become smitten with Princesses Elizabeth (Kimberley Kates, who was in a DTV murder mystery called Dangerous Love with LAV's Lawrence Monoson) and Joanna (Diane!!!). Able to recite classic rock lyrics at will for the sake of philosophizing (and to happily confuse the torture device known as the iron maiden with the Iron Maiden), Ted charms these predetermined brides with this impromptu stanza:

"Oh, you beautiful babes from England,
For whom we have traveled through time...
Will you go to the prom with us in San Dimas?
We will have a most triumphant time!"

But it ends disastrously upon the arrival of their daddy, the royal ugly Duke (John Karlsen), and the duo are saved from the guillotine by Billy the Kid and Socrates (Tony Steedman). With no time left to lose ("The clock in San Dimas," Rufus told them, "is always running"), Bill & Ted continue forward by snatching up the likes of Sigmund Freud (Rod Loomis of The Beastmaster and Jack's Back), Joan of Arc (pop star Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go's, also the dead messenger girl from Clue), Genghis Khan (Al Leong, the oriental heavy in Die Hard and Lethal Weapon), and Abraham Lincoln (Robert V. Barron, previously seen in Eating Raoul and Disorderlies).

Meanwhile, back in present-day San Dimas, the movie's trump card character, Napoleon, gets his literal day in the sun. Terry Camilleri, like much of the cast a relative unknown, might be familiar to the handful who fondly recall famed Aussie director Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris from 1974 (he later had a cameo in Weir's The Truman Show). It's a shame he didn't land a fruitful career as a physical comic after this. Adapting the Revolutionary emperor's stoic tyranny to the modern world, Camilleri's perpetually wide-eyed Napoleon cheats at bowling, conquers the public pool Waterloo ("Mon dieu!") and wields a dessert spoon like a bayonet for the last precious drop of melted "Ziggy Pig" ice cream sundae.

Matheson and Solomon play a lot more loose with the time-space continuum than seen in previous pop fables like Time After Time or Back to the Future. Random occurrences crop up so frequently during the finale, mainly to help Bill & Ted break out their jailed charges after they all get arrested for various infractions at the mall, that it becomes a battery of satirical jabs at the nature of contrived happy accidents. On a meta level, it's forgivable, although the verdict is still out on the significance of Rufus' own mission. Everything is pretty much guaranteed excellent in 2688, so where's the conflict?

Again, if you approach it on the clever satirical angle, as a lampoon of the culture of rock star worship be it Elvis Presley or Eric Clapton, you won't need to get hung up on dubious logic. There's a reason the "Three Most Important People in the World" are members of The Motels, The Tubes and The E Street Band (deep-voiced saxophonist Clarence "The Big Man" Clemons, R.I.P.).

Director Stephen Herek's debut movie, 1986's Critters, began with a sublime, FX-powered visual joke at the expense of an intergalactic assassin borrowing the visage of a video star who is clearly a wannabe Mick Jagger (Terrence Mann as Johnny Steele). After the first Bill & Ted, he found a modest career as a hired gun in his own right, helming a battery of Disney productions (The Mighty Ducks, Mr. Holland's Opus, the live-action 101 Dalmatians) as well as many middlebrow trinkets (Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Rock Star, Life or Something Like It). Herek is the poor man's Chris Columbus, another once-promising craftsman who forsook imagination for assimilation.

That's a shame, because Herek's low-budget beginnings are further credits to the evolution of youth-friendly 1980s comedy away from the bastard sons of Porky's. And again, it's a huge relief when you look at Diane Franklin's resume from 1985 onward. Savage Steve Holland spun teen tropes on their heads like a dreidel in his Better Off Dead, although his gift for whirling dervish burlesque was eclipsed by Ted Nicolaou's TerrorVision and his outlandish parodies of nuclear families, materialistic scenesters and the cultural brain drain. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, by its own rights, makes pleasant time-capsule material in its varied riffs on 1980s pop flotsam right at the dawning of a new decade.

Where else are you going to see Billy the Kid and Socrates act like libidinous boys on the make, only to be foiled by Freud with a corn dog? ("Geek!") Or Joan of Arc copping Flashdance-style spastic gyrations to an audience of refugees from the Jane Fonda Workout Video? Or Ludwig van Beethoven (Clifford David) discovering the magic of the synthesizer and extolling the virtues of "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi?

Or, finally, when all is most triumphant in the universe, Honest Abe emancipates an entire auditorium from their boredom with the Wyld Stallyns' two most timeless credos: "Be excellent to each other and...PARTY ON, DUDES!"

My only rebuttal: "Awesome! Totally awesome!"

The next review in this retrospective is another academically-themed teen movie from 1989, yet there's good news and bad news. The good news is that Diane Franklin will reunite with the creator of her single most charming role. The bad news is that she will have even less screen time than in Bill & Ted.

Bogus!

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood

TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: BORDELLO OF BLOOD
(R, Universal Pictures, 87 mins., theatrical release date: August 16, 1996)

Pop culture will eat itself, and Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood is, in its self-devouring way, as voracious as a behaviorally-reconditioned zombie falling for the rich taste of spilled entrails all over again.

In the first part of this mercifully split review, I offered half-hearted praise to Demon Knight, Ernest Dickerson's attempt to launch HBO's horror anthology series as a cinematic commodity. It wasn't as satisfactory as films like Warlock or Dr. Giggles, which I found unabashedly entertaining, but it also wasn't as much of a bust as Evilspeak or Wishmaster. The many elements of Demon Knight aligned well enough to give it a recommendation, from Dickerson's exuberant style to the varied performances to the giddy thrill of the hand-crafted gore.

What I really wanted to get across was that there was potential for the Tales from the Crypt Presents franchise to carry on the series tradition of combining left-of-center talent with comfortably crass formula. Bordello of Blood, sadly, skimps on the "talent" part of equation and jackknifes into the quicksand bog of "crass."

The first sign of trouble is that this is solely based on a story by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, and not scripted purely by them. Demon Knight was not an original idea from any of the show's brain trust, but seeing the men who brought you Used Cars and Back to the Future in the credits is enough to raise your expectations. However, this was an idea that existed as far back as 1973, which somehow did not attract the checkbook of a single enterprising drive-in merchant in almost two decades of sundry Crown and Cannon films.

Taking rewrite credit are director Gilbert Adler and A.L. Katz, Crypt series honchos who also produced Freddy's Nightmares (which I forgot to mention the last time) and previously collaborated on the screenplay to Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice. All I can say is this: Imagine an unproduced Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond script being revived by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

That is Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood. I wish I could end it on this.

The movie begins with an extended riff on the fake-out opening sequence from Demon Knight, only one which actually ties into the story to come. We are introduced to Vincent Prather, played by dwarf actor and Charles Band regular Phil Fondacaro, leading some greedy banditos on an expedition through the Tierra del Fuego. What appears to be a treasure hunt turns out to be a ritual involving the desiccated corpse of Lilith (Angie Everhart), a Queen Attila whose drawn-and-quartered heart is restored and thus allows Vincent total control over this ancient harpy.

"Where's our old pal, the Crypt-Keeper?" says no one but the hopelessly faithful, and sure enough, what we've just seen is a story idea being pitched from one Mummy (see if you can guess the actor, and no cheating) to another. The bandaged schmoozer proves a bit too irritating for our John Kassir-voiced mascot, and thus they engage in an all-or-nothing round of Chop Poker. P.S. that previously unnamed veteran character actor is neither Lance Henriksen or Kevin Tighe.

One overlong wraparound segment later, and we finally get our ever-groping hands with Bordello of Blood. The set-up involves the unruly metalhead brother of a Bible-thumper on a fateful visit to a funeral parlor where the password to pleasure is "Cunningham wake." Said miscreant, Caleb Verdoux (Corey Feldman), and a barroom bud get an eyeful of the underground brothel's chesty clientele, but say a mouthful in the presence of Lilith, who comes in for the heart-ripping climax.

Caleb's sister Katherine (Erika Eleniak) files a missing persons report with the procrastinating police, but is approached at the station by Rafe Guttman (Dennis Miller), a persistent, penniless P.I. who goads Katherine into allowing him the case. In a performance that suggests what would happen if Bill Maher were cast as the lead in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, Miller is unflappably sarcastic as he navigates every gumshoe cliché which follows, as Lilith develops an insatiable appetite for Guttman's sleazy blood.

Nothing's surprising at all about Bordello of Blood except for the fact that even as "a bad Tales from the Crypt episode" (Miller's description, not mine) stretched out to 80 minutes, it makes its immediate competitor in the hip bloodsucker stakes From Dusk Till Dawn seem like a GREAT feature installment of the series. Say what you will about that Quentin Tarantino enshrinement, at least it was craftier in its exploitative nostalgia. It had its heart and ate it, too.

Adler goes for a camp-vamp overkill which places it squarely in the lower rungs of the genre, with enough dated satire and leery T&A to completely ruin almost any chance this film as at being funny or sexy. The shadow figure of Lilith's nefarious pyramid scheme is Reverend Jimmy Current (Chris Sarandon), an obvious swipe at Jimmy Swaggart which was no longer fresh the moment Ozzy Osbourne released the scabrous "Miracle Man" in 1988. Chris Sarandon, who like Feldman seems to be here solely for his association to more fang-tastic career highlights, is valiantly animated as the gimmicky guitar thug who duck-walks and windmills his piety, but the welcome is ultimately wasted.

Despite all the hardbodies Adler rounds up in various skimpy burlesque costumes, the only nudity which sticks out involves a cadaver who is given unsavory attention by nutty mortician McCutcheon (Aubrey Morris), who tweaks her nipples with a hearty "Toot! Toot!" God damn.

And with his unceasing flippancy and stream-of-thought references to Catholicism, Agent Mulder and the Fortress of Solitude, Dennis Miller comes across as less Bill Murray and more Mike Nelson than one anticipates. He's so stuck in riff mode that the character proves gradually transparent and all that's left is a bottomless keg of Miller Lite, which is still somehow enough to leave you tapped-out on the third pint. You can't even laugh out loud at some of his more inspired throwaway quipsm instead just chuckling quietly and thinking to yourself "Enough already!"

The wad-blowing finale is as formulaic as they get, with enough exploding hookers to rival Frank Henenlotter without his trashy sincerity (and Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" finally proving insufferable) and a capper which will come as no surprise. And when you get an Oscar-winning "special guest" who is known for her sense of humor to show up out of nowhere, at least devise something funny for her to do.

The only thing Bordello of Blood doesn't completely bungle is Angie Everhart's saucy, slinky command of her villainess Lilith, who doesn't get much to really do but gives the film its only semblance of sex appeal and proper camp. She's to Bordello of Blood what Billy Zane was to Demon Knight, bless her. Lilith knows that the best way to a man's heart is in his pants, but there's nothing else as convincingly kinky to rival her, not even Phil Fondacaro's Sinful Dwarf.

Bordello of Blood helped drain the life force out of the Tales from the Crypt dynasty, so much so that the trilogy's end, 2002's Ritual with Jennifer Grey and Tim "Death of Some Salesman" Curry, was consigned to DVD purgatory. The Crypt-Keeper went out without a scream, but a Dead End.

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight

TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT
(R, Universal Pictures, 92 mins., theatrical release date: January 13, 1995)

Interior: a bloodied bedroom at night. The camera glides across the scene of the carnage as a buxom blonde in black lingerie phones her illicit lover, Jack, to break the good news. The woman has just planted an axe in the chest of her wealthy husband, Carl, and is writhing passionately on the bed, orgasmic in her description of the dirty deed. As Carl is soaking in a vat of acid down in the basement, the murderess draws a hot, soapy bath, unaware that she is in an E.C. Comic version of reality where the dead don't lie still for very long. Placing a hot towel over her eyes, she cannot see Carl's grisly corpse is approaching with an axe of his own to grind.

Unfortunately, the only cut is off-screen, as it is yelled by the director of this tawdry tale, none other than your old pal, The Crypt-Keeper (reliably voiced by John Kassir). He is not too pleased with the "hack-ting" of guest star John Larroquette as zombie Carl, tossing off a couple more puns in anger before calling for a reset. That this moment occurs after we've seen the familiar opening credits sequence of the HBO series Tales from the Crypt, replete with downstairs tour and Danny Elfman's jaunty theme music, seems to tell us we're not getting the same old slash-and-jive familiar from the TV scream.

Nope, the Crypt-Keeper's gone Hollywood, and is taking his show to the sinner-plex. Okay, I'll stop, which is coincidentally what happened to the Tales from the Crypt Presents banner after just two widely-released movies.

The 1980s was the decade of the horror anthology revival, which went full throttle both theatrically and on television. Not only was there a Twilight Zone: The Movie released by Warner Bros., but there was a New Twilight Zone developed for CBS. Warner also distributed 1982's Creepshow, the George A. Romero/Stephen King collaboration which kicked off the trend, with its own unofficial, syndicated spin-off in Tales from the Darkside, which was also made into a movie. However, by the time it was released in 1990, its popularity was eclipsed by Tales from the Crypt, which came from the same pay-TV channel who brought you The Hitchhiker and was produced by the some of the biggest wigs in the biz: Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis.

The series premiered in June 1989 with three back-to-back episodes which boasted these blockbuster directors (excluding Silver) offering their own personal spins on William Gaines' controversially lurid EC Comics. The series would go on to court fellow superstars like Michael J. Fox and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would each direct their own episodes, and revolving door talent in front of and behind the camera helped keep the show fresh on a weekly basis. In short, Tales from the Crypt established a successful blend of irony and scatology, reveling in cheap thrills and cunning comeuppances for several years.

However, the inaugural Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight was not an adaptation of a previous story from the Gaines library. It was written as early as 1987, and was initially offered to filmmakers Tom Holland and Mary Lambert, both of whom were drawn to ill-fated projects like Fatal Beauty and Pet Sematary Two. Before it even made it to Joel Silver, it was passed along to schlock horror impresario Charles Band and his Full Moon Features label. Demon Knight was meant to be the second of the mythical Crypt movie trilogy, with Donner, Hill and Zemeckis developing their own separate entities. Universal Studios, who initially green-lighted all three planned projects, ordered this as their first.

Things didn't quite work out that way, as Donner's "Dead Easy" and Hill's "Body Count" never came to fruition. The former was name-dropped as a post-credits stinger, essentially becoming the working title of what would be Bordello of Blood, a box-office stiff. As the seventh and final season emigrated to Great Britain, Tales from the Crypt was clearly on its way out. The final episode adapted The Three Little Pigs, itself originated in English literature, as a decidedly Mad Magazine-style cartoon which was even more puerile than Green Jellö.

Although the opening tracking shot evokes Zemeckis' early "And All Through the House," the maker of Forrest Gump doesn't fully influence the final project in the manner of, say, Mr. Spielberg. The director of Demon Knight is Ernest Dickerson, a famed cinematographer known for the early Spike Lee "joints" from She's Gotta Have It to Malcolm X. Dickerson made his feature debut with the ghetto drama Juice (1992), which starred Tupac Shakur as an unstable, Cagney-worshipping thug named Bishop(!) who homicidally threatens to derail his friend's promise as a star DJ. After that, it became clear that Dickerson's directorial career was less informed by Do the Right Thing and more by the less incendiary, genre-friendly yeoman's work of Def by Temptation.

This is the Ernest Dickerson of Surviving the Game and Bones, refashioning familiar B-movie scenarios into much livelier if no less disposable entertainment than any handful of low-budget/direct-to-video hacks. The plot as it stands is a straightforwardly apocalyptic knock-off of Night of the Living Dead, pitting good vs. evil and placing a disparate bunch of stereotypical bystanders under siege from the supernatural.

The mysterious adversaries at its center kick off Demon Knight with a car chase as our eventual hero Brayker (William Sadler) fervently unloads a shotgun at his tracker, a demon prince known only as The Collector (Billy Zane). Both vehicles explode into fiery wreckages, but Brayker crawls toward a head start into the next town, Wormwood, New Mexico, where he unsuccessfully tries to steal a truck parked outside a diner. Escaping authorities, who are tied up with the crash and The Collector's damage-proof survival, Brayker runs into the friendly neighborhood lech, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller), who takes him to safe haven at The Mission, where all that's missing is a welcome bell.

Also among the denizens of this Villa of the Damned are sassy proprietor Irene (C.C.H. Pounder); loveless prostitute Cordelia (Brenda Bakke) and her regular client Roach (Thomas Haden Church); a disgraced postal clerk named Wally (Charles Fleischer); and work-released housekeeper Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith), who will reveal herself as a purer soul than her equally hard-boiled hosts, most of whom turn stool pigeon on a dime. For instance, since Wormwood's such a small world, Irene intuits that her latest customer is the car thief Roach mentions and calls Sheriff Tupper (John Schuck) and Deputy Bob (Gary Farmer) on the scene, with The Collector in tow.

Just what is it that this chrome-domed, cock-of-the-walk Occultist covets? It's a combination key and vial filled with holy blood that in the right hands can be used as a weapon against evil, and the worst case scenario being that it could be used with six other keys for the same evil to take over the world. The Collector is foiled in his acquisition, and one memorably sick decapitation later, he conjures an army of green-eyed Pumpkinheads to lay waste to his human enemies. As Brayker spills his magical plasma to barricade the windows and doors, The Collector dutifully possesses the weak souls of his captives, and in turn spills their blood as punishment.

Whereas Night of the Living Dead had a palpable sense of friction and social awareness, Demon Knight condescends to juvenile degrees even Tom Savini resisted in his straight 1990 remake. It wouldn't be a Tales from the Crypt movie without a moment in which one character's temptation is lifted straight out of a beer commercial, where the girls are topless and the booze bottomless (but not the other way 'round...this is R-rated, after all). In the film's most refined moment of black comedy, Irene gets her arm ripped off by a crazed Cordelia and is later offered it back on a silver platter by The Collector, to whom she lifts up her stump as a means of flipping the bird. There's even a lost boy thrown into the mix, Danny (Ryan O'Donohue), the same tot who scared Brayker away from the diner, who reads a poisoned issue of Tales from the Crypt which takes him over, the subsequent chaos mirrored in the panels of the book.

Dickerson keeps the slime and splatter flowing in a rather futile attempt to cover up the utter senselessness of the scenario. There is a puzzling moment where one of Brayker's force fields is shotgun-blasted out of commission by the noxious Roach, thus allowing the demons easy passage. Whilst Roach will later betray the rest of the survivors by scrubbing off the blood which bars the demons, that violation of safety at least seems credible. But if a gun can shatter the blockade like it were plate glass, you'd presume The Collector could help himself to the weapons in the cop car and get at his victims a lot easier. Not that there is a rationale for how The Collector does manage to return to inside the motel; he just shows up without even a dramatic entrance.

Equally flimsy are the limitations imposed on the good guy, Brayker. There are seven stars burned into the palm of his hand, each meant to represent someone he is forced to guard, and if all seven die, Brayker apparently loses. If he runs out of good blood, he loses without even them taking the precious Key ("They bring back the darkness...just like that"). Forced into explanation, he screams, "God damn it! I'm not making these rules up!" Nope, he didn't, but three flailing screenwriters certainly did, and they generalize Genesis to such a degree that the name "Jesus" is never once intoned even with obvious crucifixion flashbacks. And if Brayker is supposed to protect these seven flakes, maybe the joint suicide bombing of Irene and Bob which happens later is a huge mistake.

On a purely pulpy level, though, Demon Knight has plenty going for it. Billy Zane imbues sinister charm and glee into the role of The Collector, owing more to Beetlejuice than Freddy Krueger as he taunts his foes ("You're not worth the flesh you're printed on!") and croons disingenuous come-ons to first Cordelia and then Jeryline. Jada Pinkett Smith proves her mettle as a feisty heroine, although her best moments are built-in to the film later on in typical Final Girl fashion. However, it's William Sadler's resolute, ravaged lone wolf which keeps the action credible and the stakes high. As adept here as his Niles Talbot was in Walter Hill's first season Crypt episode "The Man Who Was Death," Sadler conveys a universe of intensity and ferocity in both his gritty delivery and behind blue eyes.

The rest of the supporting cast perform duly to their strengths, with C.C.H. Pounder's brassy matron and Thomas Haden Church's yellow-bellied braggart the clear highlights. Dick Miller is a delight to spot in dutiful "That Guy" fashion, but Dickerson never deigns to showcase him with as much invention as Joe Dante would allow, and Charles Fleischer's simpleton is the butt of a particularly lame topical joke which posits him as yet another budding psychopath.

Although the demons themselves are impotent enemies, as a lot of the killing comes from possession-and-dismemberment routines straight out of The Evil Dead, Todd Masters and his FX team have a field day with their creations, all drippy flesh and eyes as brightly green as Herbert West's reagent formula. There is also a hasty if spectacular farewell to The Collector which is a practical tour de force.

Unlike Wishmaster, which stained too hard to live up to Fangorian standards with very little to show, Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight is a distinctly mediocre thrill but nevertheless spirited where it counts. Putting it in context of its televised antecedent, though, it's a shame that both this and Bordello of Blood were such warmed-over, secondhand premises for which to launch a theatrical franchise. Given that its producers were responsible for gems such as The Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Superman: The Movie, the lack of imagination on a conceptual level is frustrating. But this first attempt proved to be it's most satisfying, especially compared to its desperately campy follow-up.

To be continued, Creeps...

Elvira's Haunted Hills

ELVIRA'S HAUNTED HILLS
(PG-13, The Elvira Movie Company LLC, 89 mins., theatrical premiere date: June 23, 2001)

Late September back in 1988, Cassandra Peterson's buxom, beehive-wigged alter ego Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, finally saw her own feature film hit the big screen seven years after her fateful debut on Los Angeles' Channel 9 late night programming block. The sex symbol of All Hallow's Eve was poised to take over the world of cinema as part of her deathless merchandising empire, or at least would have if only distributor New World Pictures not went bankrupt immediately before its scheduled release. The feature-length spin-off went from wide release to showing in less than a one-fourth of the nation's movie theaters. Peterson, who had hustled and struggled to make the flick her way against the whims of the studio system, experienced what she referred to as "postpartum depression" in the aftermath.

Peterson celebrated the new millennium by shooting Elvira's second vehicle after more than a decade of false starts and corporate disinterest, but the game had changed drastically. Both she and her then-manager/husband Mark Pierson budgeted the film out of their own nest egg, mortgaging their home and borrowing money from Mark's parents. Shot on the cheap in Romania (read: real live Transylvania) for $1 million, Elvira's Haunted Hills was more stressful to film because it was so self-financed and equally taxing to market as the duo hit the festival circuit running. In the wake of that film's limited release, Pierson and Peterson filed for divorce.

Elvira's Haunted Hills, written once again by Peterson and her Groundlings mate John Paragon, places Elvira in another fish-out-of-water context, but this time inspired less by fundamentalist social mores and 1980s pop culture than by Peterson's B-horror fangirlism. In particular, Peterson and Paragon look back to the Roger Corman-produced gothic horrors which starred Vincent Price and were frequently based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Imagine Elvira being a guest at The House of Usher, where her trademark saucy wit and silly egotism is anathema to the morbidity surrounding her.

The obvious joke here, even more deliberate than in the earlier Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, is that no longer is Elvira merely hosting antiquated, cheesy "fright night" fodder, she's actually in the movie.

So when this film's Roderick Usher proxy, Lord Vladimir Hellsubus (Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien), flies off into a protracted grievance about the sanctity of the local cemetery being defiled by grave robbers, Elvira has to slap/snap him out of it, a la Cher from Moonstruck, and quip "What are you going for, an Oscar?"

Elvira retrieves Hellsubus' curved, Tomb of Ligeria-style sunglasses from the ground and is duly warned of his extra-sensory malady: "My eyes are tortured by all but the faintest of light." Her comeback: "Aah, so you've got a hangover, too, huh?"

This is the norm of the type of humor which Cassandra Peterson's Elvira has proliferated into profits, a high-spirited combo of Morticia Addams and Mae West with a wry voice equal parts Grande Dame and mallrat. On the surface, Elvira doesn't look any worse for wear in her trademark black dress emphasizing her long legs and outlandish cleavage, which naturally doubles as "her own airbags" in case of a coach crash.

Not a lot of set-up (or, for that matter, follow-through) to discuss, as the film opens in Carpathia, 1851, with Elvira and her French companion Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith) making a doze-and-dash and escaping from an axe-wielding innkeeper (Theodor Danetti's Johan) in Benny Hill-style fast-motion. After roughing it on foot en route to Paris, where Elvira has an engagement performing her one-woman show "Yes I Can Can," a horse-drawn chariot comes to their aid as the passenger, Dr. Bradley Bradley (Scott Atkinson), offers them a room at Castle Hellsubus.

The Hellsubus clan is (super)naturally cursed, with Hellsubus eternally tormented by the suicide of his late wife Elura and his cataleptic niece Roxanna (Heather Hopper) coughing up a chunk of her lung on Elvira's "medicine chest." Dark family secrets involving torture, premature burial and adultery rear their ugly heads, but Elvira puts on her best "What, me worry?" face and flashes her rear at the end of a vampy musical number, "applause" emblazoned on her panties.

Meanwhile, there's a willing chunk of Eurotrash beefcake working out in the stable, named Adrian (Gabriel Andronache). In trying to high-tail it out of the dreaded castle, Elvira stops off to give him two goodbye presents, a copy of the Kama Sutra and a physical demonstration of its first chapter. All the while, non-English-speaking actor Andronache is dubbed in comically asinine fashion by veteran voice actor Rob Paulsen, prompting Elvira to break the fourth-wall during his introduction: "How does he do that? Weird!"

If you think I'm dishing too much of the jokes and japes in Elvira's Haunted Hills, then rest assured there is plenty of Vaudevillian slapstick and sarcasm which I haven't yet ruined, although the experienced viewer will feel constant déjà vu. It's certainly not a fresh film in terms of humor, even with the vast gulf between this and her 1988 outing, mostly because it's such a straight-up showcase for the Elvira character, who is less of a catalyst here and more of a verbal mood-shifter. Although the film positions her as Elura's spitting image/possible reincarnation and gives her a few eerie premonitions, the ever-so-brassy Elvira fails to revolutionize like before.

Despite a steady stream of corny but faithfully-rewarding chuckles based around Elvira's oblivious, egocentric retorts, Elvira's Haunted Hills doesn't reach the riotous peaks of the earlier film. There isn't a line on the level of Elvira's self-objectifying farewell speech ("Tell 'em I was more than just a great set of boobs. Tell 'em I was an incredible set of legs, too!") or a set piece as audacious as when that aphrodisiac-spiked casserole caused those pious Fallwell citizens to have an orgy in the park.

The period settings are handled with fidelity by director Sam Irvin, who gets in the kind of grainy exterior shots, foreboding interior creakiness and shoddy special effects which do right by the source material and give the film a sense of actually watching these old AIP-distributed Corman films proper. It's spoof as verisimilitude, and reinforces the overall good nature of this passion project.

The trouble with the film is that for as far as guileless camp goes, Elvira's Haunted Hills lacks the chutzpah of classic Mel Brooks or Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style parodies. The whole project has the feel of if not lowered, then undemanding ambitions. There is a sincere thrill in seeing the likes of Ms. Peterson and Richard O'Brien hit their hammy marks with lightning force, but I never fully shook off the notion that this is processed comfort food on the order of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. I would've loved a second helping of that divine mystery casserole, myself.

A Midnight Clear + Inside Monkey Zetterland

A MIDNIGHT CLEAR
(R, InterStar Releasing, 108 mins., theatrical release date: April 24, 1992)

INSIDE MONKEY ZETTERLAND
(R, I.R.S. Media, 93 mins., theatrical release date: August 25, 1993)

Let's get hypothetical for a moment. Now, imagine you are a casting director in the year 1986, and you were hired to assemble the stars of a generic teen movie. This is a project that clearly requires actors to play the reliable roles of the bookish boy everyone picks on and the boorish alpha who instigates his humiliation. The nerd and the jock stereotypes, devoid of all subtlety and no different than any characters from B-movies past.

Suppose you were so hard up that you hedged your bets, and, based on the resumes given to you, you would cast these two parts based entirely on experience. You want to choose male performers who not only fit these parts to a T, but have done it many, many times before. There's no time to subvert anybody's image or launch a new career, you just typecast without prejudice. And no, Anthony Michael Hall and William Zabka did not get the memo to try out.

Now, given the scenario, what if two of the guys auditioning were Keith Gordon and Steve Antin? I think your work is officially done, my friend. You don't have to keep searching. You got your men.

If you evaluated the careers of Gordon and Antin throughout the entire 1980s, you'd realize that for as bad as female actors get it having to play idealized, objectified ciphers over and over again, typecasting is generally anti-discriminatory. I couldn't think of a single actor who embodies the tape-rimmed dweeb more than Gordon, and I couldn't imagine a more preening, noxious stud than Antin. Their respective cult successes are based entirely on them playing interchangeable variations of the Dork and the Dick.

Dressed to Kill and The Last American Virgin. Christine and The Goonies. Back to School and Survival Quest. Do I have to spell it out more?

Eventually, both Keith Gordon and Steve Antin got bored with this and broadened their ambitions to honest-to-goodness filmmaking. In Gordon's case, he didn't have to wait too long, as he was already acquiring on-the-job training from the directors whom he worked for, including Brian De Palma, Bob Fosse (on All That Jazz) and John Carpenter. Also, he had read Robert Cormier's best-selling novel The Chocolate War on the set of Jaws 2, and he held onto the prospect of a film adaptation until the moment he started getting offers in the wake of his Mark Romanek collaboration Static (1985).

Antin, meanwhile, was building up connections within the industry and lucked into a partnership with a USC film school professor named Jefery Levy. Yes, the same Jefery Levy who co-wrote Ghoulies, for God's sake. The duo produced a pair of indie movies in the early 1990s that didn't make much of a splash outside the festival circuit, and Levy's own S.F.W. (think a Gen-X version of The Legend of Billie Jean, which was another acting vehicle for Keith Gordon) was a critical and commercial failure in early 1995. Antin kept a low-profile until the 2000s, creating the failed WB series Young Americans, but it was through his sister Robin's neo-burlesque troupe The Pussycat Dolls that he truly began to resurface, parlaying that into 2010's Burlesque, his second directorial effort following a 2006 TV-movie sequel to the teen suspense film The Glass House.

But around the time Antin's maiden effort at screenwriting was coming to fruition, Gordon was already on his second major motion picture. And it is this period in time, 1992 to be exact, which will be the focus of my first dual-movie review since Brian Yuzna's Society and Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion. I didn't have to work hard on that because both of those movies were on the same DVD, but I rented Gordon's A Midnight Clear and the Antin-penned Inside Monkey Zetterland separately to size up the aesthetics and attributes of both these former actors and budding creators.

And also because I love a good showdown as much as anybody.

First up is A Midnight Clear, based on the 1982 novel by William Wharton, whose debut tome Birdy was previously filmed by Alan Parker and won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1985. Taking place prior to the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, this WWII psychodrama focuses on a six-man U.S. Army intelligence & reconnaissance squadron shipped out to the Ardennes Forest to suss out the Nazi Party's next move. This oppressively wintry No Man's Land could be Belgium, Luxembourg, France, or even Germany, as the film's central character and narrator Sgt. Will Knott (Ethan Hawke) relays. But in the thick of the conflict, he admits that "I'm not even sure of my name," the name which he has been ribbed for since the third grade and whom his platoon have affectionately abbreviated to "Won't."

These I&R grunts have been fatally pared down from their original dozen, but that doesn't deter Major Griffin (John C. McGinley), a mortician in civilian life, from handing them their latest raw deal of an assignment. Fortunately, a family dynamic has developed between Will and his comrades in arms, with the eldest of the group, Vance Wilkins (Gary Sinise), nicknamed "Mother" because of his orderly personality and the seminary trainee Paul Mundy (Frank Whaley) as their "Father." The ranks are filled out with dry-witted equipment specialist Bud Miller (Peter Berg), the Yiddish-proficient Stan Shutzer (Arye Gross) and the more-than-capable star soldier Mel Avakian (Kevin Dillon).

They situate themselves in a deserted country house where a previous patrol team went lost, which logically translates to "they're dead," for the week's duration. With plenty of wine, sardines and four satin-blanketed mattresses, this is their rare brush with the Life of Riley. Alas, it isn't long before enemy movement and speech put the squad on their guard, specifically the phrase "Schlaf gut!" ("Sleep well!")

Driven on by Major Griffin to locate their command post,  Will, Stan and Bud find themselves in the enemy's rifle sights on the trek back, but the situation doesn't escalate into violence. The Germans disappear like a mirage, leaving the Americans further confused. The next night out in the foxhole, after Stan has built a snowman as an insult to Hitler, the Germans continue to taunt them, only this time with a snowball fight. Stan is convinced that this is a sign of genuine pacifism or possible surrender, suggesting this theory first to Will and then the rest of the group.

The German soldiers they are surveying appear willing to negotiate an armistice in the wake of getting creamed on the Russian front. The only caveat is that both sides have to fake a battle so that there is no accusation of treason. The culmination of this acquired intelligence, which is duly kept under wraps by the Yanks from their superiors, is a festive pageant of peace in which the Germans mount a Christmas tree and offer presents and carols to the befuddled but humane Americans, not unlike the similar holiday ceasefire on the Western Front during the previous world war.

How this development implodes is not surprising, nor are the film's equally sobering themes of lost innocence, weathered humanity and the many tolls visited upon the psyches of the varied troops. The real brilliance of A Midnight Clear is in Keith Gordon's preternatural knack for economy as both writer and director. Working within limited means both scenic and sensational (filmed as it was in a vengefully chilling Park City, Utah), Gordon strips the firepower and narrative clutter from the mostly Vietnam-centric war films before him to craft a character piece about intelligent if inexperienced young men demonstrating grace under pressure.

Birdy, as you may recall, was as much about the poignant friendship between two teenage boys of distinct social skills as it was the damage inflicted upon them after the war, be it physical or mental. The titular Philadelphia youth's avian obsessions became a self-defense of the soul. Wharton's A Midnight Clear is more linearly aligned, but the real life G.I. and impressionist artist's empathy was at its peak. And Gordon is singularly passionate enough to realize the story's mournful power on the screen, without descending into unsubtle madness like Alan Parker or erstwhile influence Stanley Kubrick.

The six protagonists demonstrate boyish humanity and an appreciation for beauty, whether it be in the joint sexual awakening of Will, Stan & Mel by a suicidal, widowed waif named Janice (Rachel Griffin, the future Mrs. Gordon) or Mother's awe at the paintings preserved in the chateau's attic: "Somebody made something, probably not even for money. For love." Mother is the most frail-minded of the soldiers, established as early as the opening scene, his surrogate children now in the position of protecting him and devising some scheme of honorable discharge as mortal intervention.

Gary Sinise, forever known as Lieutenant Dan, offers the most heartbreaking characterization of the ensemble in one of his first film roles. There's not a weak link in the entire cast, with rising stars Peter Berg (another major grower in the industry like Gordon and Antin), Ethan Hawke and Kevin Dillon all turning in their most proficient, natural performances. Even the reliably gruff John C. McGinley (like Dillon, another Platoon vet) as the power-mad Major Griffin doesn't fashion a caricature out of a performance that with a little more screen time and a lot less discipline could have been truly worthless. The same goes for Larry Joshua as Lt. Ware, Griffin's less bellicose but equally no-nonsense flunky.

Gordon has himself copped to anti-war intentions in his story, but they are more organic than matter-of-fact when you watch his film. Compositionally, Gordon is on-point in the bleak humor, realistic dialogue and tableaux of frostbitten violence which he has sourced from Wharton's tome. There are images as disturbing as they are divine, from the saintly statue clutching its own decapitated head to the way two sparring soldiers are trapped under ice in an eternal dance, no different from when their living counterparts show off their USO choreography to lighten the mood.

A Midnight Clear left me deathly eager to view Gordon's subsequent Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Mother Night and Waking the Dead, his celluloid tone poem to lost romance. And also to ponder the injustice of this film not getting the high-definition restoration for the U.S. home video market like it recently received in the U.K. Gordon and his regular DP Tom Richmond (whom Ethan Hawke would draft for his 2001 directorial debut Chelsea Walls) deserve to remaster this personally, as this is a Criterion Collection catalog title in limbo.

I re-watched A Midnight Clear out of joy as opposed to Inside Monkey Zetterland, which was more out of the kind of mercy Gordon's film encouraged. And even then, I felt like I wasted my time twice.

Jefery Levy and Steve Antin's previous low-fi effort Drive (1991) earned a healthy respectability thanks to the former's visual flair and the latter's ability to play straight man to the unhinged British thesp David Warner. You could call it the 1990s heir to Alex Cox's Repo Man if you were feeling charitable, maybe even a rewrite of Elmer Rice's play The Adding Machine, replacing its vibration-metering calculator for monochrome chrome.

The pseudo-autobiographical Inside Monkey Zetterland, alas, is an insider's joke which makes the poor viewer feel like Antin's Passenger from their earlier film, desperate to be dropped off for the good of your soul. Antin, morphing from the poor man's Eric Freeman into the poorer man's Eric Stoltz, casts himself as the depressed title character, an out-of-work actor who openly derides his career of "teenage exploitation shit" to those who recognize him and laments his wayward passage into adulthood in psychiatry sessions he volunteers to have publicly studied by med students.

Monkey really wants to be left alone to pursue a film project based on the corporate demise of L.A.'s Red Car transit system (the exact same scandal referenced in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), but is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish (i.e. carjackers, overzealous cops) and the tyranny of family.

Monkey's mother Honor (Katherine Helmond), an aging soaps queen, is pugnacious and pushy to a breakpoint. His younger sister Grace (Patricia Arquette) is an emotional wreck upon learning her lesbian lover Cindy (Sofia Coppola) has gotten herself illicitly pregnant in an attempt to start a family. His swish brother Brent (Tate Donovan) works at a salon and is constantly distracted by his cordless phone. And his absentee father Mike (Bo Hopkins), a deadbeat hippie, returns home for Thanksgiving with his pet parrot Joey, although he is greeted with comparatively less disgust than Grandma Zetterland (Frances Bay).

Such a contentious kinship dutifully courts bedlam, but there's nothing genuinely comedic or compelling about the wall-to-wall petulance on display. Every character, even Antin's ostensible mild-mannered woobie, seems to have been written and directed with an unwavering emphasis on mundane narcissism, without a trace of wit in the dialogue or progression in plotting. It's too lethargic to be farcical; even the time-honored snuffing of the parakeet or the goodbye obscenity shouted by a little old lady fall as flatly as the conflicts which set up these hackneyed jokes.

The episodic nature of the film, which more often than not comes across as improvisational (not for nothing is Brent groomed up by his appearance on the Groundlings stage), makes Bloodhounds of Broadway and Singles resemble prime Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph. The result means that this distinctly plays out as an outline more than a real, staged script. And Jefery Levy's quirky aesthetics render them no less insufferable. Visually, he locks down his camera as actors wander out of frame or are heard behind walls, straining to juice vicarious vérité from insipid cliché. The sound design is equally sour, deploying Tchaikovski passages on both piano and calliope and indulging ear-splitting impressions as Monkey pitches his screenplay and recites passages from it like the world's worst puppet show entertainer. It's almost as if Levy wants to leave me as tin-eared and dead-eyed as his supposed proficiency.

The combined vanity of both Levy and Antin trickles down into the kind of stunt-casting which ought to grant Quentin Tarantino eternal critical clemency, even from Mark Kermode. For it's not enough that Monkey Zetterland's home life be a parade of the horribles, but Antin keeps tossing in outsiders to test his faith and our patience simultaneously.

Monkey's girlfriend Daphne (Debi Mazar) dumps him out of boredom and has taken his beloved yellow bedroom drapes with her. Meanwhile, Sandra Bernhard as girl-next-door(!) Imogene flirts mysteriously and maniacally with Monkey at the local library. Less welcome attention is provided by Bella (Ricki Lake), a disturbed fan of Ma Zetterland who stalks about their not-unlisted abode. And then there are Sasha and Sofie (Rupert Everett, Martha Plimpton), anarchic new neighbors who prove a bad influence on the vulnerable Grace.

Bernhard and Mazar are, for all intents and purposes, each recycling their verbally castrating shtick. Imogene shrieks a loony lullaby whilst giving Monkey a lift from a taco stand, deliberately passing his home as she inquires if he's a fan of Faulkner. Later, she will greet Monkey from out of his daydream by gabbing on about a gang-banged friend and then immediately asking "Do you wanna have lunch?" Bernhard gives the most charming performance of the entire film, which most certainly cannot be said of either Debi Mazar, whose Queens accent has never been more abrasive, or Ricki Lake in a major downgrade from her work with John Waters.

However, it's the gross misuse of both Rupert Everett and Martha Plimpton which finally awards Keith Gordon the victory by K.O. Like much of the cast, Everett is a real life icon of the gay community and a performer not lacking for charisma. He deserves a plum role every go, but the material here reduces him to a dime-store Mel Gibson. It's even worse for Ms. Plimpton as the bulimic firebrand, a role so irredeemably nasty it would backfire on anybody who performed it, no matter their degree of fame. Even accepting her involvement as a kindly favor for her Goonies co-star, this whip-smart actress still should have said no.

All of the trendy star power on loan here fails to distract from the crashing realization that Steven Antin's male ingenue insularity and Jefery Levy's coarse amateurism amounts to a legit endurance test. Let's be honest and admit that these guys' true destiny is creating outright schlock, not satirical dispatches from the Hollywood fishbowl. At least The Last American Virgin (Kimmy Robertson gets a special thanks) and Ghoulies (Luca Bercovici appears in a cameo) struck a chord with the intellectually-challenged 1980s children who grew up with them, no matter if you agree or not with Antin that they are "teenage exploitation shit." I, personally, find them very inessential rather than quintessential. But Inside Monkey Zetterland is frivolity with pretensions, which means both Antin and Levy are in way over their heads.

Red Car? Good point! Now do yourself a favor and seek out A Midnight Clear on home video, or, as an added alternative to Inside Monkey Zetterland, any of Bobcat Goldthwait's movies from Shakes the Clown to Willow Creek.

The Craft

THE CRAFT
(R, Columbia Pictures, 101 mins., theatrical release date: May 3, 1996)

Texas Frightmare Weekend 2015 is approaching fast, and I've been keeping up with the guest announcements and such. This is one of the most high-profile events in the three years I have attended, having missed seven previous conventions. The first year I went, I guess the biggest draw was Danny "Machete" Trejo, who packed such a crowd that I remember Mariel Hemingway referred to the line outside his photo op as the "Trejo 500." I wasn't in that line, honestly, as it was conflicting with my date with a princess...

Ahem.

But year two upped the ante in that it featured a full-scale gathering of personnel from the Terminator series, including Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Michael Biehn, Kristanna Loken, and Earl Boen. Even Hamilton's tormentors from the same year's Children of the Corn, John "Isaac" Franklin and Courtney "Malachai" Gains, were in attendance. I had a great time at that event, too, mostly because I spent it with a friend I made the previous year. And whilst I understood that the potential to top even that star-studded weekend celebration was possible, I had no idea what the 2015 roster would bring.

Suffice it to say, 2015 has done the same thing 2013 did in the presence of Diane Franklin: it has awakened the teenager in me.

I say that because the year marks the debut convention appearances of some of the biggest names from my 1990s childhood, particularly Neve Campbell and Skeet Ulrich, as in "Sidney Prescott and Billy Loomis from Scream." But you don't have to be Ghost Face to recognize that these two had made an earlier splash in 1996 before Wes Craven's self-effacing horror blockbuster laid bare the rules of horror both past and future. You don't even have to know who fellow first-time attendee Rachel True is, but it helps, because 2015 is when that old black magic comes to Dallas in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of The Craft.

Before Scream author Kevin Williamson archly intertwined John Hughes (The Breakfast Club) and Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps) in the Robert Rodriguez-helmed The Faculty, The Craft stood out as the decade's most recognizable high school spookshow by injecting voodoo into the sardonic teen angst formula. This could charitably be called "Hexers," except that the central clique in this film aren't idle rich snobs but outcasts from the word go, a brooding collective of female misfits whom their callous peers have christened "The Bitches of Eastwick."

Or at least that's how Ulrich's Chris Hooker describes them to the new girl in town, Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), freshly relocated to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Sullen Sarah carries the trauma of a mother who died giving birth as well as suicidal slashes down her wrists, and is now forced to make a fresh start at St. Benedict's Academy, a parochial school just as ripe with classism and cruelty as any non-uniformed establishment. Sarah gravitates towards the terrifying trio, regardless, after nonchalantly demonstrating her powers during French class.

Chris will go on to slander Sarah as punishment for her not putting out, thus giving her all the reason to devote herself full-time to the supernatural machinations of her black sheep BFFs. They all seem to lack proper self-esteem for various reasons. Grand high Goth Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk) has a sluttish reputation of her own and lives in a trailer with her alky mom and deadbeat stepfather. Meek Bonnie (Neve Campbell) has burn scars down her backside from a traumatic accident, whilst Rochelle (Rachel True) is the lone Negro student and susceptible to the catty insults of the mean blonde from Night of the Demons 2.

Séances and slumber parties ensue, with such ritualistic bonding exercises as blood oaths, beauty makeovers and the ever-popular "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board." All in the name of Manon, an all-powerful, all-natural deity who is described through analogy as the stadium God and the Devil would play football on. The girls pray their troubles away, and Manon hears them, and so, in quick succession, Bonnie's damaged skin tissue regenerates, Rochelle's racist bully develops female pattern baldness and Nancy goes from poor to posh after willing her penniless, perverted stepfather into a stroke and inheriting his life insurance funds.

All's well for them and for the audience, as The Craft fancies itself a playfully macabre twist on teenaged fantasy for a spell, or until the spell wears off. The conflict begins when the increasingly resentful Nancy decides she wants invoke Manon directly through a beachside bonfire and demand his almighty powers. The next morning, she walks on water as various aquatic mammals die on the sandy turf, all the while she screeches that these are her "gifts." Sarah is rightly perturbed, but her self-centered friends remain blissfully ignorant. And when Sarah's own wish to have Chris wrapped around her finger goes horrifically awry, Nancy takes it upon herself to get even by murdering him.

Gradually, The Craft reveals itself to be another grasp at slick, superficial morality from the ham-fingered writer of Flatliners. The naturally-crafted Sarah is elevated to Good Witch status as Nancy, tempting irony by the casting of ex-Disney child star Fairuza Balk, devolves into The Even Worse Than Worst Witch. And the two other girls are stripped of their integrity and rendered ditzy foot soldiers. This banal development compromises whatever slivers of rebellion and wit the film has accumulated, a celluloid sacrifice of the soul.

Flatliners at least allowed its bratty principals the divine method of closure, something Peter Filardi and co-writer/director Andrew Fleming push aside here for cheap tricks. Rochelle, in particular, is egregiously short-changed by the film's formulaic forthrightness. Part of that is down to the casting of Rachel True, who looks way too sophisticated and smart to play the fourth banana in a juvie horror film (and for good reason, as she was pushing 30). There comes a point in the film where Rochelle should arrive at the same epiphanies as Sarah, having seen the devastation her vengeance has wrought on Laura Lizzie. But when the film approaches some kind of intriguing opportunity for a truce, it fails to follow through, turning the focus over instead to the nutty Nancy.

Neve Campbell's Bonnie is undermined just as poorly. Right at the moment her confidence is restored and she is allowed to morph from Basket Case to Princess, Filardi & Fleming treat her sex appeal as a sign of snobbishness, with nothing in the script aside from the most innocuous one-liner (late for school, she sasses "Sorry, my pedicure ran late") to demonstrate this personality shift. This is no less one-dimensionally prissy than the attitudes of straw villains Laura and Chris, and speaks to the thudding, finger-wagging desire to shame which constantly reduces most teen films to rank hypocrisy.

The lead actresses as a unit demonstrate charisma the film doesn't fully capitalize on, with the possible exception of Fairuza Balk's vamp/tramp volatility. Balk's bee-stung sneer and outrageous overbite are impossible to deny as she devours the scenery with as much relish as this story eats its tail. The sensuous, green-eyed Robin Tunney works hard to compensate for the film's compromised intelligence, but even she cannot save The Craft from the perfunctory prophecy which is a prolonged siege confrontation replete with pools of maggots and miles of snakes, followed by a misguided coda which renders its characters as unsociably sour as their stigma suggested.

Like Joel Schumacher before him, Andrew Fleming relies on visual panache and trendy flash as the be-all-end-all. There is an extravagant, earthy texture to Alexander Gruszynski's cinematography which also meshes well with the digital FX work used for levitation and catching butterflies. Fleming has a liberal fluidity with the camera, and combined with Jeff Freeman's editing and the sound design, the centerpiece séance is the most bewitching moment of The Craft, so to speak.

Graeme Revell's score stings and swoons admirably, but is engulfed by the alt-rock song selection which teases Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Sweet and Jewel at best, and overemphasizes a handful of poor cover versions at worst. The film begins with Our Lady Peace's grungy, garbled take on The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and ends with Heather Nova listlessly draining the human touch from Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch." The makers of Charmed must have seen this and loved Love Spit Love's anemic retread of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" though. Maybe Charmed was the unofficial spin-off of The Craft the way Friends was meant to be "Singles: The Series"?

"Whatever!" seems like the right response, as The Craft labors under the pretense of authenticity to the Wiccan faith (the threefold karmic comeuppances in favor of "Do onto others...") but is grossly conformist at heart. Its rushed-upon-the-blade apathy is its tragedy, and although it is undemanding fun in the right setting, it does not honestly achieve the kind of magic which has kept it in cult circles for nearly two decades. E.C. Comics don't take themselves as seriously as The Craft double toils to.

Singles

SINGLES
(PG-13, Warner Bros. Pictures, 99 mins., theatrical release date: September 18, 1992)

A decade after his Fast Times at Ridgemont High script charted teenage wildlife with smarts and sensitivity, Cameron Crowe came further of age with Singles. This was his sophomore effort as writer/director after Say Anything, which found Crowe in a memorable position in terms of 1980s youth cinema. Fast Times broke through among 1982's rut of smut by establishing a diverse, identifiable trajectory through senior year for its coterie of characters, finding wry dignity among the humiliations of crashed cars, sexual follies and apathetic pep rallies. And as teen movies grew more sophisticated, Crowe closed the decade out with the bittersweet Say Anything and eclipsed John Hughes in the process.

Crowe's most endearing quality as a writer by the 1990s was his propensity for humanist naturalism. He didn't opt for cheap melodramatics and listened to the hearts of his youthful protagonists with brotherly concern. The dialogue felt authentic, the sticky situations were handled with grace and the performances he oversaw proved star-making, even if the names of few would fade over time (Judge Reinhold, Ione Skye). Crowe treated both Jeff Spicoli's stoned surfer philosophy and Lloyd Dobler's wounded romanticism with unbiased empathy, and almost everything else in between just felt more facile by comparison.

These highs emboldened Crowe to aim for a West Coast parallel to Woody Allen's Manhattan, although the idea for Singles had been gestating ever since 1984, when Crowe cranked out a cheapie cash-in on Fast Times called The Wild Life. The unimaginative title was indicative of the movie's overall quality, and it faded into obscurity despite having Eric Stoltz and Lea Thompson among its rising star ensemble.

Crowe's background as a rock 'n' roll writer also led him to the underground Seattle scene, which would topple the Sunset Strip's hair metal blitz in the popular culture by the time Warner Bros. settled on a release date. This was blessed and cursed in equal proportions, as while seeing Alice in Chains and Soundgarden live is anthropologically stimulating, the publicity for the actual movie indicted Crowe for allegedly piggy-backing on the grunge explosion, when it was the studio who were being so grossly opportunistic. They even deigned to change the maligned title of Singles with that of "Come As You Are," based on the one Seattle breakthrough rock band who kept their distance from Crowe's project.

The catalyst for Crowe as well as the local musicians was the heroin-induced loss of Andrew Wood, front man of Mother Love Bone. There was a ripple effect which caused the Seattle scene to bust even wider open, as Crowe found inspiration for his revised script, Jerry Cantrell would write Alice in Chains' most beloved song in Wood's honor (heard live in the film, that tune is "Would?") and the remaining members of Mother Love Bone would migrate to Pearl Jam.

"Is anybody truly single?" Crowe asked himself in the midst of the tragedy, and Singles attempts to reach an answer amongst the strain of miscommunication and awkward vibes. The affluent, independent young adults Crowe spotlights dare to fall in love against their better judgment. The primary coupling of environmental crusader Linda Powell (Kyra Sedgwick) and transportation engineer Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott) would seem like the perfect match, but personal commitments and romantic horrors from their past keep them on their guard.

Linda, for instance, has recently been burned by a deceptive lothario named Luiz (Camilo Gallardo), posing as a visitor from Spain whose expired visa sets them on a whirlwind courtship. Just as Linda is getting serious about commitment to the absent Luiz, she catches him down the bar one night making moves on another single woman. Instantaneously, she buys a new garage door opener to replace the one she gave him as a keepsake, echoes of Diane Court's legendary parting gift of a pen to Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything. Steve, meanwhile, is bemused by the rat king he finds himself in after his last failed affair, and decides to devote himself to work, "the only thing I have complete control over."

Linda fatefully meets Steve at a nightclub, leading to a "water date" at the local café. They finally hook up at Steve's apartment after some initial trepidation, struggling to balance their obligations even as Linda becomes pregnant, but frustration and fulfillment tend to go hand-in-hand. The other tenants in Steve's complex also get locked in push-and-pull relationships, with coffee shop waitress Janet Livermore (Bridget Fonda) vainly attempting to ensnare the affection of a detached, delusional wannabe rock star, Cliff Poncier (Matt Dillon), lead singer for Citizen Dick. Meanwhile, the non-committed likes of head waiter David Bailey (Jim True) and advertising executive Debbie Hunt (Sheila Kelley) take it as it comes.

Whereas Bailey is content to collect 20 phone numbers in his watch as a show of self-importance and Debbie is so hard-up she follows through on a video dating lead her friends gifted her as a joke, Linda has her mind set on the terminally aloof Cliff. "You're spazzing off on me," he retorts when Janet attempts to persuade him of their connection. Janet even contemplates breast augmentation surgery to stack up against Cliff's Amazonian ideals, a co-dependent mistake she luckily avoids once she wises up to her own rut and goes her own way, finally spurring Cliff into paying attention.

All the while, Crowe lets his characters occasionally break the fourth wall in confessional and structures the action as a barrage of sketches. The title Singles takes on a dual meaning when preface cards such as "The Hourglass Syndrome" and "Blues for a T-Shirt" crop up, as Crowe essentially pulls a Nick Hornby by turning plot into record collection inventory. A tactic like this is more frustratingly cutesy than his humble slice-of-life insights require, and also not a little self-indulgent. First we watch Janet recoil in humiliation from making a risqué phone call to someone who is not Cliff, and then it's back to Steve and Linda's anxious unraveling of their romantic ambitions.

Crowe's writing needs no devices because, just as before, there is charm enough to divvy up in fair proportions. Bridget Fonda is at the height of her plucky beauty as Janet, the kind of mid-twenties eccentric with a refrigerator full of boho dead giveaways (half-eaten birthday cake, a cup of Chinese takeout sauce), but aware that she only has limited time before she goes from endearing to simply bizarre. When the going gets rough, she consults plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Jamison (Bill Pullman) for increasing her bust, inviting a playful chemistry as they argue over a simulated computer image of Janet's wild quest for beauty. The farewell meeting between these two is aggravating in that it denies any kind of reunion between Janet and Jeff, such fun as it is to be around them.

Debbie Hunt, meanwhile, may be termed a maneater but she's not despicable in her endeavors. All she wants is a boy toy to accompany her on vacation to Cabo, sensibly. The commercial package she purchases from the video dating service comes complete with the $20 bargain of being directed by Tim Burton, who is lauded as being "only, like, the next Martin Scor-seez." The big reveal is hilarious, from its opening rip from Psycho to "Debbie country," which is "where the flavor is." Naturally, this leads to one of the candidates being Peter Horton from TV's thirtysomething, who parks his bike in between Debbie and her roomie Pam (Ally Walker).

Cliff, the Wyld Stallyn of Seattle, is played with enough self-effacing aplomb by Matt Dillon, whether leaning back on Hendrix's grave with an arrogant smirk or desperately clinging to Citizen Dick's following in Belgium for security. Band mate Eddie Vedder mumbles his way through Cliff's paragraph in a review (conducted by Crowe, who salutes his own journalistic upbringing), but Cliff will not be deterred: "This negativity just makes me stronger!" Alas, being without Janet reduces him to confiding to the camera, too, and his fumbling attempts to get her back pay off marvelously just by simply saying those magic words: "Bless you."

Even eligible bachelor Steve has his own odd details. When he and Linda get intimate, he tries to keep from climaxing by means of a locker room interview with his favorite hoop-dreamer Xavier McDaniel.

Singles does make token nods to the post-1980s milieu of safe sex (a college party where people dress as their favorite contraceptive) and uncertain careerism (Tom Skerritt as the mayor of Seattle lowers the hammer on Steve). But Crowe ultimately finds in these character's philosophies, such as Janet's ambivalence towards casual sex, the root of companionship that is what these characters sustain themselves with on the road to love. Coffee shop conversations, oddball platonic friends (James Le Gros as Linda's intellectually overbearing ex-item Andy) and body politics all take on the curved inconvenience of traffic work as they approach their destinations.

Not to say that these threads are entirely successful. For every moment of plausible outrageous misfortune (like broken answering machines), there is a predicament like Linda's pregnancy that is rendered trivial in the grand scheme as most vignette-based movies tend to demonstrate. Better to bury yourself in your job than confront the situation head on, which may be true to the characters but also likely to make a viewer shrug.

Still, even if this doesn't progress as puckishly as Fast Times (which may be more a credit to Amy Heckerling) or as compellingly as Say Anything (which remains Crowe's calling card), Singles works both as a throwback to Generation X and an amiable portrait of the upwardly mobile dating scene. Even though Chris Cornell appears both with and without Soundgarden (you can even hear a demo version of what would be "Spoonman"), the film's shaggy dog quality is best summed up by the two songs from Minneapolis' own Paul Westerberg which propel the movie, "Waiting for Somebody" and "Dyslexic Heart." The latter song asks "Do I read you correctly, you need me directly? Help me with this part," and that's all you need to know in reacting to the way Crowe tugs on your flannel shirt.