Altered States (1980), Ken Russell.

Oh my GOD William Hurt is a self-absorbed asshole in this!

Winnebago Man (2009), Ben Steinbauer.

Monumentally disappointing!

Winnebago Man sat at the #1 spot on my Zip.ca list for a month or more, as I greedily awaited its arrival.  I enjoy the pleasures and lessons of VHS trash culture - from the Everything is Terrible!  website, which sews together strangely compelling VHS clips  http://www.everythingisterrible.com/ to the Found Footage Festival, where I first heard of the "Winnebago Man" phenomenon.  Story is, working with abrasive pitch man Jack Rebney was such a chore for the guys hired by Winnebago to make a promotional video that they took every blooper, every one of Rebney's characteristic swearing sprees, and compiled it all into one epic display of  middle-aged self-loathing.  (Oh, you downtrodden salesmen of America)! Then, somehow, the tape got into other hands -- copies proliferated.  Eventually the tape was so widespread that the Rebney rants became a part of pop culture lore.  In fact, phrases from the underground tape were so well known that Rebney rants even made it into mainstream Hollywood films and TV.

For the record, I'd never heard of the mysterious, underground tape and I had never heard of Rebney but Ben Steinbauer had and became compelled to learn what happened to him and whether the tape had any impact on Rebney's professional or personal life.  His obsessive research leads him to Rebney pretty quickly (within the film's first 20 minutes).  Rebney is now in his 70s and acts as the caretaker of park area in California.  But the film sputters once contact is made.  Steinbauer tries to personally connect with the man, probe his life and interests and sympathize with a somewhat unlikeable, eccentric individual (who also happens to be going blind, not good for a man in self-imposed exile).  There's a moment in the film where Steinbauer asks himself if he's made too big a deal out of the tape and the impact it could have had.  Yes, I felt like shouting.  Because basically we had 60 more minutes of movie left and I seriously doubted much more could be said on the topic of Jack Rebney.

Just like in The Best Worst Movie, a documentary that also explores the relationship between fans and actors in cult products, Steinbauer peddles Rebney around at film festivals.  Somehow, this all feels like an effort to resolve something more for Steinbauer than for Rebney.  Compare this with some of the actors from Troll 2, likeable people who connected well with fans they never knew they had.  The Best Worst Movie is fun (hey, so is Troll 2) and there's a decent story behind the making of a cheapo horror movie that flopped but is still inexplicably beloved - but Winnebago Man doesn't recapture the same magic.   

The Roaring Twenties (1939), Raoul Walsh.

 Crazy kids, drinking hooch and crashing their jalopies!

The Roaring Twenties should be remade PRONTO, substituting the criminalization of marijuana in place of booze for its story arc.  This is a gorgeous looking film, very crisp, but I will admit to growing distracted and doing other things while it was on.  The film strikes a decent balance between acknowledging that the Volstead Act was a bad law, and chastising folks who profited from it.  I'm just not a fan of sentimentality, although it's interesting to observe that it only took about ten short years for Hollywood to become nostalgic for its glory days. 

Priscilla Lane plays the object of James Cagney's affections, but she's about as intriguing as a pan of warm milk.  And she sings constantly, those dull little sentimental ditties that white folks in the twenties liked so much.  

First, she sings on the train:

Then she auditions in a club.

What is this one, maybe "Yes, sir, that's my baby"?

Oh, another number.

The film kicks off with Cagney and Humphrey Bogart sharing a smoke in the trenches but then this sing-song romance consumes most of the film, obscuring the more interesting story of Cagney's struggle as an ex-soldier to re-integrate into society (turning instead to bootlegging).  Cagney's great as usual but the film only really comes alive when he plays off cranky, hardbitten Humphrey Bogart.

The Outlaw (1943), Howard Hughes.

"Billy the Kid, huh?"

Ecch!  Although from only 1943, The Outlaw felt like it sprang from TV, with stilted dialogue and goofy singsongy tunes playing in the background.  You know that tune, that 50s ode to consumerism with lots of happy strings skipping up and down.  Walter Huston smirks and banters with Jack Buetel, who plays smug adolescent Billy the Kid.  Then, Billy the Kid rapes Jane Russell in the hay.  What?  This movie is known for boobies, boobies, boobies, Hughes' fetish, but I didn't see any and by twenty minutes in I couldn't take no more.  Fascinating as an oddity but a strange viewing experience.

Baby Doll (1956), Elia Kazan.

"I don't eat a nut that's been cracked by a man's mouth."

Technically, this is a "he walked out of the room" movie, not a "movie he made me turn off."  It's just a shade over the top, ridiculous, out there, nose-wrinkling.  I guess there's a reason the Catholic Church had it banned.  I reveled in it.  It's got genuinely good acting, a bafflingly grotesque depiction of southerners and the awesomeness of awesomeness: Eli Wallach (El Cattivo!) cast as a seductive Sicilian in trimly belted trousers, holding a fly-whip and breathing all close and heavy like on our titular Baby Doll (played by Carroll Baker), the 19-year old icy virgin wife of Karl Malden.  

Baby Doll is very stagey and, in parts, shouty.  I do sometimes find that a photographed play can sometimes be a mis-use of film - it's by no means an interpretation of a written work for film, it's simply capturing a stage performance.  But there is something to savour there, and it's the acting style and the general approach towards Tennessee Williams from when his material made it big.  Karl Malden gets the low marks for doing nothing but yelling.  He's very monotone.  But to see him sweat and struggle and pull on his sad, diamond-shaped thatch of what passes for hair in extreme frustration allows a few gems like, "WHAT IS THIS, GRASS?" to pass by.  Malden's character is the ultimate loser, perhaps the biggest loser ever encountered onscreen.  He fails at everything.  His crime is even discovered in the first act, and is even obvious to his thumb-sucking bride with her fourth-grade education.  He can't even yell at Aunt Rose (who looks like Harpo in a tea towel) very effectively.  Yes, the black farm-hands and Chinese workers constantly giggling at him from the edges of every scene do make a slightly distasteful margin illustration, but again, it also just echoes what we in the audience are doing.

I loved the greasy details and for a purely visual medium like film, Baby Doll just about has a stink.  The floors are rotting and slippery with melted icebox trays.  There's a pigpen in the front yard (how scenic) and  all they eat for breakfast is a Coke.  Sure, today, Baby Doll looks kinda hokey but I bet you if anyone made such a bluntly rude picture about the lack of sophistication in rural Quebec, or Alberta bible-thumpers, well, sign me up because I would be laughing all the way through that one, too.  

Possessed (1947), Curtis Bernhardt.

Joan Crawford loses it for Van Heflin (!), a smug engineer who claims to be more in love with the curve of a parabola than anything she's got and blows cigarette smoke in her face while "making love to the piano."  Crawford plays nurse Louise Howell, a woman who from the first moment we see her does not have much of a grip on reality.  Very strange tone to the film - is it a soap, a horror? - it's kind of everything.  And I'm not very interested in parsing the term "noir," which also gets attached to this film.  I was surprised by one sequence in which Howell's husband brings her to his lake house, which is draped for the winter season and was the site where his previous wife drowned; Howell had been this woman's aide.  Even though the house is deserted, Howell is convinced she can hear her old mistress buzzing for her through the intercom.  As she makes her way upstairs, we get a proto-hand held camera effect.  The shaky shots follow Crawford's figure up the stairs and into the empty bedroom, giving that same immediacy and intimacy than it's meant to do today.  OK, so I might have jumped when let out that blood curdling yell once she gets to the bedroom.  Very cool! 

The themes in these "women's pictures" intrigue me.   I can never tell if any of the men are supposed to be romantic ideals or if they are all meant to be seen as total unreliable dopes and scoundrels.  The trope of the wealthy man who stands by his psychotic, bedridden wife:  frankly, it seems to grate depressingly against any kind of fantasy - well, I'd rather be enjoying his cash, not going nuts laying in a four-poster.  This would be why I found The Damned Don't Cry far more fun than Possessed.  Van HEFLIN?  OK, I'll dip my toe: maybe Possessed could be seen as a women's noir, with hommes fatals the total undoing of our protagonist.

There's a lot of chitchat between Raymond Massey and Van Heflin about Canada which is amusing - apparently people are all "spread out thinly" (where did they go, Pickle Lake?) and we all drink a lot of "Kentucky Whisky" (not anymore).  Massey of course was born in Canada to a well-established family; while a grad student, I once volunteered to give historic tours of his childhood residence.  It was super deluxe, with built-in hardwood cabinetry, plenty of decorative plaster molding.  I followed a script and monotonously repeated that Raymond Massey was best known for playing Abe Lincoln.  The house by that point had fallen on hard times - in the 70s or 80s the basement was kitted out as a DJ booth for a radio station and by the 90s it was abandoned and used by squatters.  I came across a few forks while escorting the Raging Grannies through this interesting piece of architectural history.  I couldn't tell you if it is even standing today but another adjacent Massey residence is now The Keg.  Ah, Canada! 

Don't move, or I'll turn the Governor General's grandparents' place into a steak house!

My Dinner With Andre (1981), Louis Malle.

Sigh.  Disappointed with both this and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two failed viewing efforts.  I felt like I was expected to write 2500 words on the concept of time afterwards.  I suppose some viewers enjoy a challenge, but I also wonder if they tend to be college aged guys that make you mix tapes on your first date.

McLintock! (1963), Andrew V McLagen.

Dear God, someone, please poke my eyes out.  There's apparently one other film left in the McLagen oeuvre that uses an exclamation point in the title but I don't think I am going to make it.

They Died With Their Boots On (1941), Raoul Walsh.

War hero worship for droolers.

Re-Animator, (1985), Stuart Gordon.

There's a special list of movies that my significant other has made particular judgments about. This either ends in us shutting off the DVD player, or him exiting stage left with the comment, "I'll let you finish this one." These aren't really "movies he made me turn off" because obviously I have the power to control a remote, but kind of an endearing list of intolerance for crap. I'd just like to point out that this is a guy who happily watched all of Gymkata.

Here's the first: Re-Animator.

Final comment, "I'll leave you with your sci-fi." Well, I suppose there's an element of sci-fi, but it's more an 1980s ripoff of the HP Lovecraft short story, which was a 1922 ripoff of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Not a bad low-budget production, but definitely conjured up the disturbing memory of being a little kid in the video store and seeing, at eye-level, the video cover art of a bunch of idiots whitewater rafting in a giant yellow raft with tits.

Not the movie I watched, but similar.

Result (for Re-Animator, not - shiver - Up the Creek): Finished this one, it was kinda cute. Yes, there's tits, but it was the 80s. I think the only movie I have ever seen where every character is covered in blood.