The Hand (1981), Oliver Stone.

This is a majestic sequence where cartoonist Jonathan Landsdale loses his hand in a car accident, streaking the entire side of a tractor trailer with blood and continuing to play blood fountain all over his macrobiotic,  loft-lovin' New York wife!  Enjoy!  Because that's as good as it gets.  

Once upon a time, A&E was a fancy new cable channel --- and yet, it played The Hand constantly.   But really, The Hand is one of the lesser "murderous hands on the loose" films.  The characters are all quite static, and there's no tension - we know he's a mental case that blames his severed hand for all his problems.  Having lost his source of income to the guy who later played the voice of Roger Rabbit, Caine escapes to California, which is depicted as a dreary place where it pours rain constantly and is populated entirely by country music loving rednecks!  The scene between Oscar winning Caine and Bruce McGill (below, left) who starts every sentence with "Ah reckon" is quite the thing.  Just off him already!  This disk had commentary by the director, Oliver Stone, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.  This isn't as bad as "Manos" Hands of Fate in the hand-related B-movies but next time you're hankering for something of quality from this specific genre, I'd highly recommend The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) instead.  

This trunk is roomy, Ah Reckon.

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.  

The Naked City (1948), Jules Dassin.

The Naked City takes deep focus to another level:  every face in the background is part of the story and worth following, if only for half a moment.  The film is deeply detailed, filled with hats, hand-lettered shop windows, subtle gestures.  This is a vanished time and place where kids amble along unchaperoned holding corn dogs and jump ropes.  The Naked City comes alive in street scenes.  When leads exchange dialogue, it's a little less captivating except for the final quarter when our young detective Halloran finally finds his main suspect Willie Garzah (above).  Interrupted from his prison-style exercise routine, Garzah struts in his crummy apartment, sweaty and arrogant.  Halloran, played by Don Taylor, is so perfectly vulnerable and unsure, a thin kid in an grown-up's fedora and baggy suit.  

Older detective Dan Muldoon (played by Barry Fitzgerald) shows Halloran the ropes as they struggle to piece together why a young model was murdered.  Everything from Dragnet to Law & Order is a bit of an echo of The Naked City which makes it feel somewhat dated rather than groundbreaking, as it surely once was.  The original cliche!

Mexican poster for Invisible Ghost

   

Cleansed of Leeches!

The Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures, 1934.

You'd think working in Hollywood in the 30s might be pretty cool, but apparently for Ed Kuykendall, it the last two years were a NIGHTMARE!

Maniac Cop (1988), William Lustig.

You got the wrong guy!  The mighty Bruce Campbell is stuck in a lame duck B-movie.

This movie is under arrest for boring the crap out of me.  Yes, this film is basically as stale as that joke.  Maniac Cop isn't a bad premise: someone in New York is on a killing spree dressed in police uniform -- is it an angry, rogue cop?  But it ambles along at a codger's pace.  It was written by Larry Cohen, who also wrote Black Caesar, and it features Richard Roundtree (Shaft) as a police commissioner.  Hey, this film is blaxploitation offspring!  Weirdest shower fight scene until Eastern Promises and keystone cops that say "ewwwwww" at the sight of a dead body.  I can't believe they made this in 1988!  

A Third Face (2002), Samuel Fuller.

Samuel Fuller and Don Ameche in Hollywood, 1941:  the writer-type and the actor-type.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.  The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.  The opposite of faith is not faith, it's indifference.  The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. 

- Eli Weisel, quoted by Samuel Fuller in The Third Face.  

If you told me up front that one third of Sam Fuller's autobiography was going to describe his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, I might have given this book a pass - which would have been a real shame.  Sam Fuller's understanding of war allowed him to call bullshit when he saw it.   "Heroes?  No such damned thing!  You moved your ass one way, and you didn't get hit.  You moved it another way, you were blown to bits.  When the battle was underway, experience and intuition, not heroics, were useful," Fuller writes, recounting his experience at Omaha Beach.  He later expresses his disdain for the phoney patriotism of John Wayne movies.  While reading The Third Face, it struck me that Fuller's Hollywood neighbour and friend Quentin Tarantino must have heard some of these yarns before they made it to print.  As he lays them out cinematically, Fuller's anecdotes seem hardly real.  Nazis dressed as mourners and priests, holding a fake funeral in a vacated town, praying over four empty infants' coffins as an ambush strategy?  Unbelievable!  A soldier muttering "I love action movies," mesmerized by a cowboys and Indians movie poster he spotted on the wall during a bloody shootout with Nazis in a cinema in Aachen?  This is right out of Inglorious Basterds!   

Fuller's oeuvre is one of a man who wasn't afraid to say no.  He refused to direct Patton, because he disliked the man.  He wouldn't allow the studio to cast John Wayne as his sergeant in The Big Red One, his most personal work based on his wartime experiences (luckily he was later able to go ahead with the project, with Lee Marvin in the central role).  But as Fuller himself points out, his films were never just about war -- he wrote thrillers, crime films and exotic love stories.  Fuller's inability to compromise lead to B-movie territory.   After the studio system completely dissolved, Fuller was left to drift professionally and the psychedelic 60s just seemed to puzzle (or at least depress) him.  In 1982 his film White Dog was so controversial that it was shelved, at which point Fuller and his family decamped to Paris.  Luckily, Fuller lived long enough (he died in 1997 in his 80s) to find himself well-appreciated by a new generation of directors that included Wim Wenders, Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino and others.        

Movie lovers who enjoy disappearing into the MGM fantasyland of film may find Fuller's works too gritty to enjoy.  In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson even goes so far as to question whether Fuller was aware of what he was doing as a director.  Fuller's autobiography makes it very clear that he was completely aware of what he is doing.  Sure, sometimes money, junior editors and cowardly studio execs made things difficult but he was very strongly propelled by a personal vision and managed to translate that into film time and again.  "People continued trying to pigeonhole me as a lefty or a righty, and my work as being liberal or conservative, projecting their own notion on me.  I wouldn't let them affect my deeply held belief system.  Peace and ethics were my beacons."  

The Naked Kiss (1964), Samuel Fuller.

Shoving dirty money into Candy the Madame's mouth.

Love.  This film swings wildly between hysterical violence (infamous opening sequence where hooker Kelly whales on her pimp until her wig flies off) and sickly sweet schmaltz (Kelly singing "The Bluebird of Happiness" to a room full of polio tots on crutches).  The tonal result is CAMP.  

"Life is sweet, tender and complete..."

Nevertheless, I loved this film's crazy mood swings.  This is one whacked out film.  Fuller has one thing right on, and that's the hypocrisy surrounding prostitution.  The town's cop Griff has a go at Kelly right off the bat -even though it's his job to keep prostitution out of his town - and then he's personally disgusted when his wealthy but oblivious buddy Grant takes a shine to her.  The women in the film are more ambiguous in their attitude towards Kelly and once her past becomes common knowledge, everyone gets the knives out.  

Mark of the Vampire (1935), Tod Browning.

Check us out, likeable leads in jaw-droppingly gorgeous tweeds!

Clever and beautifully crafted, directed by Tod Browning with cinematography by James Wong Howe.  I think I have a crush on the little lady vampire!  Let's just enjoy some screenshots here.

Wonderful staging of a conversation between our heroine and her legal guardian:  dialogue necessary to move the plot along in the background, with butterball maid inspecting delicious vittles in the foreground.

We don't even see vampires until fifteen minutes in.  Their stately, slow walking is creepy enough to set us on edge - brilliant!  

The Player (1992), Robert Altman.

Ugh.  Let's forget what we know about Altman and start from scratch here.  This film is banal, wanders endlessly, beats dead horses and has a very amateur visual aesthetic.  I dunno, when all those voices are talking on top of each other but the story is dragging, I found it hard to convince myself that this was the same guy that made McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an eight minute opening tracking shot where everyone's talking about films that had tracking shots.  It later shoves your nose in obvious film references, as in:

film poster in the background

 cutting soon after to 

Ooooooh, a sitting for "Mr M."

This is about one hour, forty five minutes after we see Tim Robbins drown a guy in a puddle.  We get it!  Altman does make a decent sketch of what jerks resembled circa 1990.  Tim Robbins, despite his gangly skinny bod and boyish face, manages to pull enough asshole vibe out of the air to fit the part.  Greta Scacchi's character loves to take polaroids and manipulates them.  This is hilarious, because it's so nineties and such a lame pseudo craft practiced by bored middle-class, middle-aged women (one notch up from scrapbooking) so not a bad way of indicating that she's a poser, not an artist.   I.E.,

Brion James ("what's a tortoise"!) looks like he's been swabbed in orange paint (he's a sun loving movie mogul, get it?).  Then there's the sex scene, which is a gut-buster.  Scacchi and Robbins are drenched (in what, sweat?  hot tub fumes?), lit in hellish reds and the sounds of jungle drums beat erratically in the background while Robbins sputters some cornball dialogue.  We had read the running time wrong and had a major debate as to whether this would become a "film he made me turn off" but mercifully it ended at the two hour mark and the remaining minutes were just DVD extras.  There is a God!