What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993, Brian Gibson)

Not counting the ill-advised, if still not wholly unwelcome epilogue, What’s Love Got to Do with It ends about ten years before the film came out. Love’s a biopic of Tina Turner (played by Angela Bassett except for the adorable then rending prologue), almost entirely focusing on her time with Ike Turner (Laurence Fishburne). Just present action, Love covers twenty-five-ish years.

Most of the time is spent in the fifties and sixties, as locally successful musician Fishburne makes it big when Bassett becomes his singer. Bassett’s a country girl moved to the big city (St. Louis), reuniting with the mother who abandoned her (Jenifer Lewis, whose disappearance is another of the film’s problems) and big sister Phyllis Yvonne Stickney. Who also disappears. Lots of disappearing characters in Love.

There are very few bad performances in Love. They’re uniformly white men too. First, Rob LaBelle shows up as Phil Spector, and he’s risibly godawful, then James Reyne is even worse as comeback Tina’s manager. On the one hand, the movie’s biggest problem is not tracking Bassett post-divorce and into her significant eighties success (forty-something Black woman recreating her career and stardom). On the other, Reyne’s so terrible. I don’t know if the movie could’ve sustained him.

They would have had to do some really good performance scenes.

The best things about Love are Bassett, Fishburne, and the musical performance scenes. Bassett’s got a fabulous stage presence (and lip-synching). But the music rarely matters. Love is the Tina Turner story (as of 1992) and, at that time, it still involved (at least in the public consciousness) Ike, which turns Love into a movie about a manipulated and groomed young woman (a characterization Turner disputed) suffering for twenty-some years before showing up the dangerous loser sociopath she’d kept famous.

Except part of the Tina Turner story is she’s badass. Once Bassett gets to the badass stage—even if it’s badass Buddhist (something else the film’s got a peculiar handle on, Tina’s spirituality)—the movie’s not just over; it’s so over, it brings in the real Turner for a musical number, a jiggle, and a wink. Besides knowing Bassett and Fishburne were great in the movie, one of the only other things I knew was Turner gets to finish out the movie, effectively erasing Bassett from the film’s memory. It’s a complicated situation, to be sure, and it probably could’ve been done well, but definitely not by director Gibson.

Gibson’s exceptionally bland. There’s no aspect of the film he appears interested in, which is strange since there are so many possibilities. It’s set during the Golden Age of Rock ‘n Roll (for a while). Gibson’s not interested. It’s about the transition into the Sixties. Gibson’s not interested.

Technically, the best scenes are the musical numbers. They’re where editor Stuart H. Pappé does his best cutting. Pappé occasionally will have bad cuts in other scenes (mainly towards the front), but the musical numbers are great. Even if the film doesn’t really tie them to the narrative. Love will do things like fold three years into three sequential scenes with nothing about the passage of time, so it’s not surprising the musical sequences are disconnected. Love buries the lede on Fishburne being physically abusive to Bassett for added dramatic emphasis, which is one heck of a move but also not surprising.

Like I said, the movie’s half as long as it ought to be—Bassett thriving away from Fishburne ought to be the story—but given what they do with the few scenes in that era (and the casting), it might not actually help the film. Not with the same creatives behind the camera, anyway.

Jamie Anderson’s cinematography is usually Touchstone Bland, but he does have a few really well-lighted scenes. Good production design from Stephen Altman and costumes from Ruth E. Carter. Stanley Clarke’s score is indescribably horrendous. Just a different score might be enough to pull Love up.

Vanessa Bell Calloway (as Bassett’s only friend) and Lewis are the best supporting performances. No one in Bassett and Fishburne’s entourage is bad (Chi McBride, Khandi Alexander, and Penny Johnson Jerald have the most significant parts), but they’re playing caricatures.

Even with its Touchstone-y constraints, Love ought to be better. Bassett, Fishburne, and Turner deserve it. Not Ike Turner, though. He was a piece of shit (and the scenes Fishburne had the producers add to “humanize” abusive Ike make him more obviously a sociopathic predator, so Fishburne being outstanding isn’t not problematic). Turner herself made some very astute observations about the film’s framing of Bassett as a victim (which a better second half would’ve helped, though it seems like it’s foundational).

So, very unfortunately, Love’s a mixed bag. Great acting—Bassett’s mesmerizing—can’t make up for an alternately vapid and bland (albeit not incompetent—except that score) production.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959, Ranald MacDougall)

The World, the Flesh and the Devil is one of those rare films where even the opening titles are spoilers. Devil is an end-of-the-world picture, all about coal miner Harry Belafonte emerging from a cave-in to discover he’s the last man alive. Except we’ve had the titles, so we know we’re also watching a movie with Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer. They really should’ve asked SAG for an exception. Or filled the picture with cameos, like Belafonte watches a very special clip from “Bonanza,” and they can get some more names in the credits.

The first act is all Belafonte, starting with the cave-in drama. Devil only runs ninety-five minutes, but they could’ve gotten another four good minutes in montage of Belafonte waiting to be rescued especially since he appears to run out of food at some point. On the other hand, it might’ve just been another Belafonte singing sequence, so maybe not. Director MacDougall often does quite well within constraints—and his suspense finale is spectacular—but he can’t figure out a way to shoehorn in Belafonte’s singing. The sequences are usually charming—Belafonte’s a great lead when he’s the lead—but they’re practically commercial breaks. They could be commercial breaks. He could sing jingles.

What I’m saying is apparently World, the Flesh and the Devil didn’t have enough corporate or brand synergy in 1959, and they should remake it as an ongoing streaming series with integrated commercials and so on.

Or not.

Anyway.

Belafonte comes out of the mine to discover everyone’s gone. He was in the mine five days. The bad guys poisoned the atmosphere, and the nuclear war-obsessed populace all went into their shelters. They came out on the second day. And all got poisoned and evaporated (there’s nary a corpse in Devil, something they really should have addressed). If you stayed in until five days, you survived. Presumably. We never find out Ferrer’s story. Devil tries to be a human drama in a sci-fi setting without much sci-fi, but MacDougall’s approach is to entirely avoid the subject, even when there’s pronounced details. So the film—and its characters—need to pretend they’re not sitting right on the table.

When you’re the last man on Earth, there’s only one place to go: New York City. It makes sense from a movie perspective—Belafonte running through the city’s empty streets provides many a striking visual—but we never find out why Belafonte’s going there. Is he from there? Family? Doesn’t matter. He finds a nice apartment building and some transport and starts setting up the new world, complete with a radio transmitter to broadcast to other survivors.

Like Stevens, who enters the picture in the second act, which is when Devil becomes a very strange race drama. The film was banned in the South, but it certainly seems like the distributors were still hopeful. Stevens and Belafonte are the last people alive. She likes him, likes him, but she’s a young white woman, and he’s a Black man. White supremacy might not exist right now, but add another white person, and it will. Some of it is subtext—Belafonte never really gets to talk about what he’s saying, and Stevens always seems super ignorant—but there are some honest moments in their burgeoning relationship.

And they’re both incredibly sympathetic and likable.

So when Ferrer arrives—the harbinger of the third act—and all of a sudden, there is another white person, and it’s a white man, it’s clear the film’s headed towards some kind of conclusion. It just takes the movie forever to get there, as Ferrer and Belafonte keep avoiding the potential for conflict and instead mope around. Belafonte mopes productively, saving relics of the old world like books and paintings—it’s not even a subplot, just something for Belafonte to be doing as he exits scenes with Ferrer and Stevens. Meanwhile, Ferrer keeps telling Stevens the clock is ticking on when he cares whether or not she’s at all enthusiastic about her consent.

The third act’s suspense finale on the rooftops of New York City almost saves Devil. The movie cops out, but the sequence itself is superb. It’s also where the film’s always admirable, but only sometimes successful matte paintings shine, and editor Harold F. Kress doesn’t have any bad cuts. Devil usually looks fine or better—Harold J. Marzorati’s black and white photography is solid—but either MacDougall didn’t get enough coverage, or Kress’s got no cutting rhythm because sometimes the editing is way too jumpy.

The Miklós Rózsa could be better at times, but it’s not like it breaks anything.

Belafonte’s always good; Stevens’s is usually good (in a tricky role; while she doesn’t consciously acknowledge white supremacy, she does realize she doesn’t like the patriarchy much), and Ferrer’s solid… enough. Ferrer’s successful as far as the part goes, but there’s nothing else to it. The part’s got more subtext than Belafonte’s or Stevens’s, so Ferrer doesn’t have to flex. And he doesn’t.

Devil’s okay. It’s trying too hard to be milquetoast, but it’s far from a failure.

The Zero Theorem (2013, Terry Gilliam)

I had been planning on opening this post about The MacGuffin—sorry, I mean The Zero Theorem—with a quip about how it’s faster to just Google “Terry Gilliam Brexit” than to watch the movie but Gilliam’s actually not one of the bad Pythons on Brexit. So I had to fall back to The MacGuffin quip.

Zero Theorem’s an interminable 107 minutes ruminating on the human condition through the eyes of Christoph Waltz’s dystopian future worker-bee. Waltz “crunches entities,” which are like little AI equations or something. It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t have to make sense. Pat Rushin’s script is terrible, but also, there’s a left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We watch Waltz do his work, which is done with a juiced-up video game controller, and the interface is very “this is a Unix system, I know this,” until it’s clear it’s just a CGI block animation with some equations written on the blocks. So he’s a gamer, only Waltz clearly wasn’t seeing these video animations because he might’ve done something to move along with the video.

It gets worse later on when Waltz gets a teen sidekick, played by Lucas Hedges. Hedges will wrest control of the game—sorry, entity cruncher—from Waltz; only the CGI won’t change at all. In fact, they just more boldly reuse the same animations from before when Hedges is doing it. So Waltz’s work doesn’t matter because the visual representation is nonsense but also because it doesn’t make any sense but also because it relates to the Zero Theorem, which is just a MacGuffin.

The movie’s layers of pointless stacked.

About the only good thing in Theorem is David Thewlis, who occasionally stops by as Waltz’s boss. Everyone in Theorem is a thin caricature, usually with some exaggerated costume design to imply depth, but Thewlis is the only one with enough costume oddities to get anything out of it. He’s got a terrible toupee, but he also enjoys the potential for dress up. It’s nearly a character.

It’s not, but nearly.

And better than anyone else.

Hedges has a lousy part but is also bad. Waltz is fine. He trusts director Gilliam and gives it his all. Gilliam doesn’t deliver and will occasionally embarrass Waltz to no end, but Waltz’s loyalty doesn’t waver. I guess he gets a gold star.

The main characters are Waltz, Hedges, and Mélanie Thierry. Thierry is the virtual sex worker—virtual sex; she’s real, the sex isn’t—with a heart of gold who falls for Waltz, even though there’s a pronounced age difference. The age difference comes up when Waltz’s computer psychiatrist (Tilda Swinton in another Tilda Swinton cameo—this time, she raps… yawn) points it out, so they turn off the computer. Thierry’s at least not a teenager.

She’s also awful.

It’s not her fault; it’s just her performance is she isn’t a native English speaker, and so has an awkward accent. Plus, she gets scantily clad and then naked (Waltz also gets naked, though the camera doesn’t linger in the same ways). What more do you want from a part?

Besides the script, Zero’s problem is the budget. Gilliam can’t make hash out of a low budget, instead utilizing cheap (and bad) CGI. He’s also desperate enough to reference some of his previous movies directly (did he forget he didn’t make Blade Runner though?). But it’s not just the CGI. Gilliam doesn’t get any help from his crew.

David Warren’s production design is the most obvious detriment. It’s all very early 2010s—Warren’s convinced the future is young people filming themselves on iPads. Aren’t they terrible? The young people, not the iPads. Waltz just can’t understand them but will eventually work his redemption arc by changing himself (not really, but the script says they have to say the lines, so they do) to fit Hedges’s requests.

Most of the movie takes place in Waltz’s home, an old church. So lots of unlikely future tech and religious imagery. Sure, let’s try that one again.

Also working against the film are cinematographer Nicola Pecorini and composer George Fenton. Fenton’s just bland and repetitive, while Pecorini’s bland, repetitive, and downright bad at a lot of the lighting. The composite shots are particularly dreadful.

The film doesn’t exactly have any moments, but there are times when Waltz gets some traction out of nothing.

Oh, I forgot. Matt Damon’s the big boss. At times even he seems to know he’s in a lousy movie.

Room Service (1938, William A. Seiter)

Room Service appears—well, sounds like—it sounds like it ends with Groucho Marx singing along to a spiritual in a stage play and breaking into occasional mimicry of a Black woman singing. For no reason. Like there was a subplot about a racist parrot they cut from the movie (it runs seventy-eight minutes, so it’s not impossible). But, no. It’s just this weird, shitty moment, which kicks Service square in the nuts.

Without that moment, I’d describe Room Service as middling, but—wait for it—inoffensive Marx Brothers. We’re in the era where Zeppo’s retired, Groucho’s checked out, Chico’s fifty-fifty, and Harpo’s seventy-thirty, but the direction’s bringing him down. Visibly.

The Brothers will get into a bit throughout the film, and director Seiter won’t showcase it. It’s like he’s resentful at his stars… all of them. I’m not sure Lucille Ball gets more than one close-up. She just sort of walks in and out of scenes, providing cleric support and reminding everyone Groucho’s dating a hottie. It’s too bad because she and Groucho have enough chemistry; it’d have been fun to see her around more. Room Service did not start its life as a Marx Brothers play, so the archetypes are a little off. Screenwriter Morrie Ryskind is more successful with some adaptations than others. Groucho’s the least successful.

Anyway.

The bad guy in the movie is Donald MacBride. He’s the company man from corporate (hotel corporate) who’s in town to throw the Marx Brothers out for being deadbeats. MacBride originated the role on Broadway, which is kind of a surprise since MacBride’s the one who knows where the camera’s supposed to be, and Seiter doesn’t. MacBride does whole scenes acting in a non-existent covering shot. Or maybe all that footage got lost. Maybe it had the racist parrot on the same reel, and someone smart burned it before it got to the editing room.

It’s not in the IMDb trivia.

The direction’s never good; about a fourth of the jokes land, though there are eventually excellent jokes (thanks to Harpo). Chico gets less and less enthusiastic throughout; he’s playing Groucho’s sidekick, only Lucy really ought to be Groucho’s sidekick, but then there’s Cliff Dunstan as Groucho’s suffering brother-in-law. Dunstan’s great. He also originated on Broadway. And Room Service is actually about putting on a Broadway play. Groucho’s the broke producer. Obviously.

Just as Dunstan has to throw Groucho out, playwright Frank Albertson comes to town to see how things are going. See, he’s broke too. He’s also the most obvious Zeppo part. It’s just so frustratingly a Zeppo part.

Albertson’s okay. He’s fine. He doesn’t have to sing or dance, he just has to moon over Ann Miller, which is weird because of a significant age difference. It also complicates Miller being good. Like, she’s good, but it’s just… no. IMDb trivia page has the details.

The opening credits are cute, which shouldn’t be as memorable as one of the film’s standouts. There are some good sequences, but they’re obvious set pieces and never as good as they should be. Some of it’s the production. The sets are just a little small, especially since Seiter’s composition is so bad. That composition—and the lack of coverage—hurts the editing. George Crone’s a little slow with the cuts, even when it’s not to compensate for Seiter, but if Crone paced it better, the movie would probably only be too short to be played as the feature. Room Service’s plot is skin and bones, and they still pad reaction shots.

The third act’s a boon. Basically, once a turkey flies, it’s on an uptick until the end.

Then wham goes the WWTF of Groucho’s singing voice.

What and why.

Penelope (2006, Mark Palansky), the family-friendly version

Between film festival premiere and eventual U.S. release, Penelope went from 104 minutes to just under ninety, apparently to get a family-friendly PG release, which makes sense since it’s based on a kids’ book. Except it’s not. Leslie Caveny’s screenplay is an original, meaning some of the film’s problems no longer have reasonable excuses.

Penelope is about twenty-five-year-old Christina Ricci. She’s a blue blood who lives in a fairy tale land. And she has the nose of a pig. Her ancestor threw over his pregnant maid girlfriend hundreds of years ago and married rich. The girlfriend killed herself and her mom, the town witch, cursed Ricci’s family. It just took hundreds of years for the curse to go active—the first female born will have “the face of a pig” until “one of her own kind” loves her.

Ricci’s parents are Catherine O’Hara and Richard E. Grant. Grant’s playing an American. Most of the Brits play Americans. Penelope’s urban fairytale land takes place in a British Manhattan. Maybe it’s in the universe where the U.S. lost the revolution and the American elite suck up to the British–much better movie.

Sadly, O’Hara’s not playing a Brit. It’d be hilarious. She’s the overbearing mom who wants Ricci to get married so she no longer has a pig’s face. Except Ricci doesn’t have a pig’s face, she has a pig’s nose–and pig-ish ears. We never see the ears. Will Ricci break the curse with true love from pauper James McAvoy or moneyed love with loathsome Simon Wood? Will it even matter?

Part of the gag is anytime a prospective bachelor meets Ricci, upon seeing her face, he runs away. The only one not to run is McAvoy, first because he doesn’t see her, then because he’s… transfixed. I assumed Penelope was based on a kids’ book because the only way the story makes sense is if, in the book, Ricci’s actually got a pig face. Then the story’s about some dude loving her for the real her, which has the added texture of Ricci and O’Hara’s most frequent repeat conversation being about how Ricci isn’t really herself until she loses the nose.

Except. It’s just a big, pushed-up nose. It’s a prosthetic. It’s not like it moves around. It’s not like it’s not well-kept. The movie also misses a really obvious opportunity about Ricci’s first kiss, though maybe in the original cut, there’s another one.

Ricci tries her best to act without being able to use half her face, thanks to the prosthetic. Her eyebrow work is phenomenal. Though there’s nothing she can do with the part, not with the writing, her costars, or the directing.

Besides Ricci, the best performances are Reese Witherspoon (who produced Penelope and, given selling her production company for a billion dollars, clearly got better at it after this movie) and Peter Dinklage. Witherspoon’s not bad, but she’s not successful either. I’m not even sure—in the ninety-minute cut—Penelope even passes Bechdel. It definitely doesn’t because even if Witherspoon has a name when she meets Ricci… Ricci doesn’t have a name because she’s incognito. Witherspoon’s in it for a couple scenes.

Dinklage is bad.

He’s just not as bad as everyone else. O’Hara’s in a similar position to Ricci, except with an unlikable character. She’s just the overbearing mom. Grant and McAvoy are atrocious. They’re both doing American accents, and they’re both terrible at them. Sometimes when he’s quiet, Grant seems like he’ll be good when he speaks (he isn’t, but seems like it). McAvoy’s consistently atrocious.

And then there’s Simon Woods as the British blue-blood who runs away from Ricci and then teams up with paparazzi Dinklage to out the freak in the newspapers.

Penelope has a minor newspaper subplot and doesn’t even know how to do newspaper printing montages. Director Palansky is full-stop incompetent. With the actors, with the composition, with the tone, with okaying the montages. Even a slightly better director would’ve helped immensely. Palansky’s only good moments are because his crew isn’t wholly inept.

Someone could’ve gotten some hash out of Penelope—no pun (though there are endless pork-related puns in the film, and none of them are funny, and we never even see how they affect Ricci because it’s so poorly done). But not Palansky. Not without a profound rewrite. You could even keep the cast (maybe not Woods).

Or just give Ricci something where she gets to use the brows.

Black Rain (1989, Ridley Scott)

Black Rain features one of the worst action movie fight scenes. It’s unnecessary—they could’ve just worked around it since participants Michael Douglas and Matsuda Yûsaku are bad at it, the fight choreography is terrible, and it manages to be the most embarrassing thing director Scott oversees in the film and Black Rain’s chock full of laughable acting, worse writing, and lots of racism.

But that fight scene.

Yikes.

The film—which, two-thirds of the way through, I realized—was supposed to be a Beverly Hills Cop sequel. But instead of Eddie Murphy cracking wise as he and Judge Reinhold travel through Osaka—Osaka City Cop?—it’s Douglas and Andy Garcia. They went out for a totally normal New York cop lunch—Douglas had just gotten railroaded by the “suits” in Internal Affairs (remember when media tried to convince the world Internal Affairs was more than enough), so he and Garcia have a drinking lunch. Now, Douglas is a tough guy cop. Garcia is the dapper, charming one. Garcia’s a lot of fun in Black Rain. He’s the only one who thinks it might be able to lead to something.

I mean, I’m sure Douglas thought he had a future as “the thinking man’s Stallone,” but he very much did not, and Rain shows why. Douglas has one-liners at the end of every scene. And he’s a dirty cop. Black Rain is about how we should like dirty cops. They’re the real heroes if you think about it. The dirty cop stuff should be the wildest the movie gets—but the racism is where it’s at. Multiple times in Black Rain, the movie pauses for Douglas to try to think of something racist to say, but then the script can’t think of anything, so he stammers out something silly. Then the nearest Japanese character has to acknowledge what Douglas said, agree with it, apologize for it, and prostrate themselves so Douglas can get in the shitty one-liner.

The film’s script, from Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, is garbage. Not just because it’s bad, racist, and fascist but because it doesn’t have a story. See, at their drinking lunch, Douglas and Garcia see eighties manga caricature Matsuda kill some guys. So they give chase—they’re hero cops, after all; the entire movie is about how they’re running to the next action scene. It’s silly but also might work with Murphy and Reinhold. They catch Matsuda and have to take him back to Japan. The exchange goes wrong, and Douglas and Garcia stay to show the stupid Japanese cops how it’s done.

At its best, Black Rain’s a good-looking vanity cologne commercial for Douglas. Jan de Bont and Howard Atherton’s photography is peerless. Rain’s gorgeous, even when it’s trying to say the Japanese are super-polluted and not chill like New York City. It’s one heck of a flex given Rain is one of those “let’s shoot New York like L.A.,” so Douglas is motorcycling around the city, often chewing gum.

Douglas is terrible. I mean, his heart’s in some of it. He delivers the racism from the diaphragm, but he’s utterly charmless. Garcia’s okay. Fun, likable. Okay. Takakura Ken is their Japanese cop sidekick. After being the brunt of Douglas’s jokes, he eventually becomes part of the gang, after prostrating himself to white savior Douglas.

Kate Capshaw’s the “love interest.” It’s a nothing role; she’s there to translate for Douglas and get him takeout, but Capshaw’s working way harder than the part deserves. You see her run out of script and direction and just wing it to try to find some meat.

Lousy music from Hans Zimmer. The Gregg Allman original song is terrible, though I do wish it were subtitled Michael Douglas’s Theme.

Good production design from Norris Spencer, who basically makes Osaka look as much like Blade Runner as he can. It’s a bad, unpleasant movie–I forgot, John Spencer’s bad in it, which is enough reason it should be avoided; John Spencer FTW—but the photography’s singular. Maybe it’s better muted.

It’s definitely better muted.

My Name is Julia Ross (1945, Joseph H. Lewis)

The funniest part of My Name is Julia Ross is when May Whitty, just after having local vicar Olaf Hytten visit, says son George Macready needs to kill Nina Foch before a doctor shows up because while they might be able to convince no-nothings like the vicar, a doctor would be able to tell she’s not mentally unwell.

Whitty’s worried a doctor might listen to a woman, which would foil their plans, and obviously, a vicar would not. If ever there were a moment for Whitty to mention she wore a mask during the influenza pandemic.

Ross is the tale of Foch’s very bad job placement. She’s a single girl living in London; her landlady, Doris Lloyd, is a mean jerk, and the building’s maid, an enthusiastic Joy Harington, is a mean jerk who’s also a thief. The film opens with Foch back from another unfruitful job hunt. She finds a letter awaiting her—a wedding invitation from former co-lodger Roland Varno. He’s off and gotten married, even though Lloyd thought Foch would seduce Varno away from his fiancée. There probably ought to be a pin in that detail—and there’s sort of a half-pin—but Ross only runs an hour and five minutes, so there’s no time for subplots.

Besides the wedding invitation, Foch also finds an advertisement in the newspaper for an employment agency she’s never visited before. So she hurries off and has such a great interview with Anita Sharp-Bolster (who’s not in Ross enough; in fact, she inexplicably disappears around the halfway mark) she gets the job on the spot. Well, after Sharp-Bolster can bring Whitty and Macready in for the final interview.

See, the employment agency is a sham. Whitty and Macready are looking for someone to replace Macready’s absent wife, but just in body. Can’t collect on life insurance without a body.

Before Whitty and Macready can drug Foch and whisk her off to the seashore for the main part of their scheme, Foch has to go home and see Varno one more time. His fiancée dumped him at the last minute for moaning Julia Ross at inappropriate times. The scene where Varno explains it to Foch is somewhat painful, as the film flexes Varno’s confusion at the fiancée’s problem. It also reveals Varno’s going to be a weak link in the cast. Foch has to hold their slight scene up entirely.

It also might not help Varno’s next scene is during some of the film’s day-for-night shooting, which looks terrible even on the backlot. Burnett Guffey’s photography is usually one of the film’s strongest technicals, but the day-for-night’s bad. Luckily it’s only a couple scenes throughout. Ross is technically solid—especially for a B picture—with director Lewis having some strong scenes. Editor Henry Batista doesn’t seem to know how to cut them, though, so there aren’t any breakout scenes.

Most of the film consists of Foch in her prison—a seaside manor house—where maid Queenie Leonard can’t figure out why Foch isn’t happy to be married to a rich guy; she’s got such nice clothes, after all. Leonard’s not in on the scheme, so Foch is usually trying to convince her to help. But Leonard’s also not going to be believing any women, especially not over upper-crust Whitty’s say-so.

Throw in regular implications Macready is uncontrollably violent, and they’ve got a reasonably compelling hour-long mystery.

It doesn’t pay off in the finish, with the finale being particularly contrived, but it’s an okay B suspense thriller. Whitty’s good, but not singular. Ditto Macready, who Lewis knows how to direct… while Macready doesn’t understand how Lewis is directing him. It’s a peculiar situation. Finally, Varno’s a lukewarm, slightly damp towel (at best).

And Foch’s okay. She’s never not successful in the part, but never anything more.

My Name is Julia Ross is okay. It’s a suspense thriller told from the perspective of the people causing the suspense, not the person experiencing it, which isn’t a sound narrative structure; it’s also only sixty-five minutes.

Night of the Lepus (1972, William F. Claxton)

Night of the Lepus is about giant bunny rabbits. The movie’s got lousy special effects. The composite shots of regular-sized bunny rabbits blown up to giant-ish size are bad, but the life-size giant killer bunny rabbit arms and body parts—only used for rapid-cut action sequences—are worse. When they have the bunny rabbits run around on model train sets and pretend they’re big, it’s the best (of the film’s options) because you get to see the bunny rabbits. They’re adorable.

With these special effects, Lepus doesn’t have a chance. It doesn’t have a chance for many reasons, but the special effects are the most obvious (and adorable). Otherwise, all the failings are boring and mundane. Director Claxton barely keeps the eighty-eight-minute movie running. Someone—Claxton, maybe producer A.C. Lyles (who, shockingly, is not an Australian who made Lepus to say “yes, bunnies are too dangerous” to his doubting Hollywood chums)—decided to let editor John McSweeney Jr. do rapid-fire cutting to cover: bad special effects, lousy acting, reused footage of the actors, reused special effects footage, boring scenes, nonsensical scenes, and stock footage. Lots of stock footage in Lepus.

The film only always uses the rapid cutting for action scenes. It’s predictable. But then, towards the third act, they start using it everywhere and anywhere. It’s an assault on the senses. And the cuts are way too fast to see the cute widdle bunny wabbits.

Then there’s the script, which manages to be joyless in its stupidity. It’s just bad writing, poorly adapted for its cast. The first actor we see is Rory Calhoun. He’s a man’s man rancher who intentionally rides his horse through a bunny rabbit burrow, breaking the horse’s leg, so he kills it and doesn’t even care. Manly.

Calhoun’s bad, but he’s so much better than eventual lead Stuart Whitman; he’ll eventually be a welcome sight. Whitman’s a bug scientist who wants to kill them off without using chemicals. Instead, he wants to do it naturally, like causing a bat plague or something. See, Calhoun goes to the local university to see DeForest Kelley (who, despite a happening wardrobe and a very seventies mustache, looks embarrassed much sooner than anyone else). Calhoun wants someone to kill off the bunny rabbits but without poison. Kelley suggests anti-poison Whitman, who travels around in a camper with wife Janet Leigh and daughter Melanie Fullerton.

Even Fullerton can tell acting off Whitman is pointless. Even in the scenes where Whitman is doing science exposition, he can’t carry the scene. It becomes about the people listening to him, waiting for him to stop talking so they can get on with it.

Leigh doesn’t embarrass herself, which is almost more embarrassing. She can weather stepping in giant bunny rabbit turds without it phasing her. It’s a compliment to her professionalism, but damn sad.

There are a bunch of other characters. They’re mostly bad, but what are you going to do about acting when it’s pretending there are giant killer bunny rabbits who eat Brussels sprouts like they’re heads of lettuce and cherry tomatoes like they’re… giant tomatoes, I guess.

Paul Fix plays the sheriff. He’s the best performance in the movie. Paul Fix isn’t going to let this Lepus nonsense get in the way of his performance, not even when he’s waiting for the other actors to remember their lines and getting visibly frustrated with them.

Ted Voigtlander’s photography is surprisingly competent. Not with the effects shots but the other times. Terrible sound design—the bunnies do phone perv heavy breathing to show they’re mean—and a weird, lousy score from Jimmie Haskell.

Lepus is the pits. But it is a movie about giant adorable bunny rabbits, so it’s at least a fun time at the pits.

Shock Corridor (1963, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller ends Shock Corridor’s main plot so quickly, it’s like he’s in a hurry to get to the epilogues. Except the epilogues are where Corridor falls flat and doesn’t have the time to get back up. As the film progresses, Fuller makes some significant achievements and builds up such an incredible momentum it seems impossible he’ll run out of speed.

Sadly, he does. Shock Corridor pulls Fuller in just too many directions and he goes with a genre standard. Or at least a genre reliable. Corridor—at the start, anyway—is a film noir. Lead Peter Breck narrates the opening in the past tense; later, he’ll narrate in the present. It doesn’t really matter; the narration’s not successful, but Fuller proves it necessary, so it’s then becomes more tolerable. There is a move Fuller misses for the narration, which is a bummer because it literally would tie the movie together.

The first thirty or so minutes is about reporter Breck trying to convince girlfriend Constance Towers to go along with his scheme to get himself committed to the state mental hospital so he can catch a murderer and win the Pulitzer Prize. He forgets to mention he’s not going to just any state mental hospital, but the one with the celebrity patients. There’s some talk about how well Breck has researched the people he needs to interview inside the hospital, but they turn out to be so famous they’d have been on a magazine cover.

Towers thinks it’s too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Not to mention gross. Breck, his boss Bill Zuckert, and Zuckert’s war buddy turned psychiatrist whistleblower Philip Ahn want Towers to pretend she and Breck are siblings and he’s been coming on to her for years. When she’s finally had enough, she’ll report him, he’ll get hauled off to the mental hospital because it’s 1963, and even though everyone acknowledges men are dangerous to women… sometimes the ladies are really asking for it.

Ew. Also, that detail should come up in the plot and doesn’t, which is a big problem with the film heading into the third act. So when Fuller’s able to right the ship, it’s magnificent. He paces it just right, leverages Breck just right—despite Brock’s sometimes omnipresent narration, he’s far better at the brooding physical stuff—and we’re almost home.

Then wipeout when Fuller dumps treating Towers like a real character. At least she’d been the de facto protagonist for the first act, some of the second. Doing right by her would’ve made up for her always getting the shit end of the stick in Corridor. When she balks at going through with the plan, Breck reminds her she works in a strip club, and so she can’t talk. We then see Towers’s performance, which is a torch singer nightclub number, while she strips off pieces of her skimpy outfit and undulates absurdly. Once hospitalized, Towers in the skimpy outfit will become the angel (and devil) on his shoulder, superimposed, imagined, objectified. Meanwhile, the real Towers is trying to convince newspaper editor Zuckert to pull Breck out, especially after his doctor—an unfortunately middling John Matthews—calls Towers to interview her about her and Breck’s fake family relationship.

All while Towers is going to visit Breck, and they paw each other.

It’s a mess.

But it’s near perfection when Fuller gets going with the procedural—well into the second act. Fuller hammers in big ideas, does fantastic callbacks, and all while basically presenting a jingoistic patriarchal worldview with some very problematic beliefs about mental health. Because Shock Corridor isn’t about Breck’s Pulitzer dreams or Towers’s skimpy outfits (though it is, obviously, it very much is about her skimpy outfits; Fuller worked hard to make up reasons for her to be in them). Anyway. It’s about these three patients and how they’ve been experiencing modern life.

First is James Best. He’s the only one we meet in the first act. The other two actors were busy when they were shooting those crowd shots and what not. Best initially presents as a Southerner who can’t get over the Civil War (shocker), but then it turns out he’s a Korean War vet who defected to the Soviets. See, his parents had raised him to be a racist Southern shit, but then something happened in the war, and he realized it was bullshit and he was being patriotic wrong, so he became a defector. And a worldwide celebrity.

Until he meets Lee Marvin from The Big Red One. Kind of seriously. There’s not not a Sam Fuller connected universe.

Best’s low okay. Until Hari Rhodes shows up, Corridor’s acting peaks aren’t particularly considerable, so low okay isn’t bad. It also gives Breck one of his first good brooding scenes when he’s got to listen but not narrate. Since we get so little about Breck’s state of mind—the question from scene one is will Breck go insane after being institutionalized—scenes where he’s got to reflect are great. And too rare, especially since he’s got a tedious “cat got your tongue” subplot in the third act to delay things for dramatic purposes.

But even with Best just being better than expected, the content’s unexpected. Shock Corridor spends the first act trying to be lurid without being too lewd. The second act is about white racists coming to terms with imperialism (sort of), followed by a Black man (Rhodes) driven insane due to the pressure of being the only Black student at a hostile Southern university, then a nuclear physicist who knows all the times we’ve averted nuclear destruction.

Gene Evans plays the physicist and ends up being Corridor’s biggest successful swing, which is something because the way Rhodes’s mental illness presents is he thinks he’s a white Klan member who wants to lynch Black people. The staff at the integrated hospital know Rhodes is a threat to the other patients but only acknowledge it after Rhodes has attacked someone. It’s a big logic hole.

Rhodes is also absolutely spellbindingly phenomenal. Even when Fuller’s script sends him a particular curveball. Usually, within a couple of lines, Rhodes has made the outlier seem foundational to his character. He consumes it. Rhodes raises Corridor to another level. With this performance in this part, it’s clear Fuller’s more ambitious.

And he makes the Evans thing work.

And action finale.

He totally fumbles the finish. The last story to tell would be Towers’s. And then Fuller takes then that acknowledgment away while leaving another thread visibly untied.

But Corridor’s often a glorious success.

Rhodes is the hands-down best, followed by Evans, then Towers. Zuckert’s good but barely in it. Larry Tucker’s great as another patient.

Great black and white photography from Stanley Cortez throughout. Jerome Thoms’s editing is less consistent, usually thanks to Fuller’s lack of coverage. It gets really good for much of the second act, then also takes a hit for the conclusion.

Shock Corridor’s outstanding. Disappointing as all hell but outstanding.

The Babysitter (1980, Peter Medak)

The Babysitter is too technically proficient for its own good. It’s a wannabe prestige lurid TV movie about eighteen-year-old girl with a past (early twenties Stephanie Zimbalist) worming her way into a seemingly perfect family only to reveal all the cracks within.

Except it’s not a seemingly perfect family—and not even by the end, actually—with recovering alcoholic mom Patty Duke, distant dentist dad William Shatner, and chronic affluenza suffering twelve-year-old daughter Quinn Cummings. Cummings was the Oscar-nominated star of The Goodbye Girl at this point, so it makes sense when Babysitter is all about her at the beginning.

Mom Duke got so drunk so often she embarrassed the family out of Chicago, so Shatner’s set them up on a commuter island near Seattle. He’s neglecting Duke and Cummings to further his career—it’s the closest Babysitter comes to a subplot for Shatner, who’s otherwise pursuing or refusing Zimbalist. But Duke’s miserable having to hang out with Cummings, who’s on all sorts of medication for unnamed illnesses (don’t worry, they forget about it by the third scene), especially while having to stay sober.

So when Zimbalist starts hanging out with Cummings, both mooning over dreamy sixteen-year-old neighbor David Wysocki, Duke sees an opportunity. Zimbalist is a poor kid who’d been working as a nanny or something, and she needs a job. Likewise, Duke needs someone to keep Cummings occupied. It’s a win-win.

After a rapid montage for Zimbalist and Cummings, Cummings—Oscar-nominated Cummings—is basically out of the movie. The second act is about Zimbalist becoming Duke’s only confidant, advising Duke about her shitty marriage to Shatner while also trying to seduce Shatner away from Duke. The third act’s all the thriller stuff, mainly with Zimbalist and Shatner, but also John Houseman as the busybody neighbor who decides to investigate Zimbalist.

It also means there’s very little room for Cummings and Duke in the third act—but even Zimbalist starts getting pushed out too. The movie’s never clear whose bad dream it’s supposed to be—director Medak tries to focus on each character to give them a shot on the protagonist stage, but no one takes it. Or can’t take it in time. Medak and writer Jennifer Miller manage to be too quick with character moments while dragging out everything else.

As a result, it’s hard to care for the finale, especially since the main cast stands around to listen to a monologue no one cares about. The movie only realizes in the last few moments Zimbalist might be due some empathy as well, except the character motivation is so erratic it’s not worth the effort.

There’s some good acting from Duke. Houseman’s really bored as the investigating neighbor, but he’s got some charm. Shatner’s better before he’s got to play shitheel. Cummings is grating, but it’s the writing.

Babysitter doesn’t have an original score, and the stock music seems a little out of date—too groovy seventies—which makes the movie feel campy, except no one’s doing camp. Especially not with Redford L. Metz’s genuinely outstanding photography. Medak’s got a real lack of consistent tone, but it’s not Metz’s fault at all. Babysitter’s got swell lighting; Medak just doesn’t know what to do with it.

Maybe a real score would’ve helped since they really leverage montage sequences with music… who knows.

During the second act, while the movie’s about Duke, it seems like it’ll have to have an okay finish. The Babysitter doesn’t deliver, but it seems like it could for a while.