Tentacles (1977): Jaws vs Giant Octopus

Tentacles (1977)
dir: Ovidio G Assonitis

Italy in the 1970s and 1980s were all about churning out cheap rip-offs of American blockbusters trying to capitalize on the latest thing. When Jaws became the latest American blockbuster, filmmakers everywhere saw it and said, "We can do that, only cheaper!" In some cases, it turned out amazing, as with the Roger Corman-produced, Joe Dante-directed, and partially John Sayles-written Piranha, which is all about a summer resort town where the river has been invaded by man-eating fish. It had style, panache, and a sense of humor and pacing, all of which Jaws lacks in spades.

Then, you have Tentacles, a sort of "what was anybody thinking?" get rich quick Italian import that rips off Jaws beat for beat, but the pure insanity of the film keeps it entertaining.

Tentacles focuses on the summer resort town of Ocean Beach, where several people turned up missing in short order, and then being found in the water frequently skinned and dead. Right off the bat, you know you're in for a special movie, because Tentacles wastes no time in dispensing characters. The first victim is a baby in a stroller, who is mainly referred to as "The Little Fatso" by his mother's friend. His mother leaves him in a stroller on the edge of the cliff next to the ocean, when he disappears. The next victim is a salty sea captain with a wooden leg, who also has fat jokes aimed at him.

Then, we get to the real stars of the movie, John Huston and Shelley Winters. They play as a brother/sister pair who seems to be way too salty and quasi-incestuous. Winters is a complete alcoholic, making drinks as soon as she gets up, while Huston calls her a fat slut in so many words. Huston's main story is that he is a reporter investigating the deaths and suspects they have something to do with nearby construction work. While Winters' main job is to drunkenly take her and her neighbor's kids around town and get them entered in the sailing contest, where surely somebody will die.

I can't tell if Winters is just playing drunk or is actually soused in her scenes, which includes a general lack of volume control, and constant one-upmanship of her kids. During the first day's events, she wears the most obscenely gigantic sombrero while she forgets her kid's name, and then complains that she spends too much money on the children while downing yet another drink. By the time she tells her neighbor that the kids want to be in the race, the neighbor says she trusts Winters, and you have to wonder who in their right mind would trust their kid to an alcoholic with vodka on her breath.

Huston gets off a little better, playing the saltiest reporter to get to the bottom of the story. Along the way, he meets with business men, but also an orca trainer who really cares about his Orcas. I mean, REALLY CARES about the orcas. Like, tearjerkingly cares.

Of course, it all ends in a gigantic orca fight with a giant octopus. This being Italy in the 1970s, they didn't really care too much about animal well-being, and so it seems they ripped apart a real octopus, who may have been living when it was ripped to pieces by the orca puppets. Which may be a bit nauseating to more sensitive viewers (far more than the off-screen murder of The Little Fatso in the stroller).

If we can forgive that bit, however, there are many treasures in Tentacles to be found. The awkward dialogue. The giant sombrero. Walkie Talkies that irritate the octopus. A constant barrage of fat jokes aimed at everybody because they're fat Americans (HA HA). Corpses who float feet up. Dead fish who sink face down. It's all so ludicrous that one can't help but be entertained. Tentacles isn't a good movie, but it's a great bad movie. And, it's a much more entertaining movie than Jaws would ever be. Jaws wishes it were this interesting.

House (1977): When the Kitchen Sink technique works

House (aka Hausu) (1977)
dir: Nobuhiko Obayashi

In a traditional sense, nothing about House should work. It's a horror movie for kids that is all about love, loss and vampirism. As a film, it uses every single technique that had been invented by that time, and created new ones just for its own humor. It never really holds its attention on any one topic for any length of time, yet creates a hallucinatory throughline story. Yet, House is one of the craziest, most entertaining, balls-out films that works on weird hallucinatory levels as well as ridiculously high camp.

House tells the story of Gorgeous, whose father is about to remarry years after her mother passed away. Because he botched the introduction of his daughter and new wife, his daughter rebels and decides to spend her vacation with her aunt in some far off town. Her 6 friends have also recently learned they cannot go to a training camp due to a pregnant innkeeper, and choose to go with her.

Her aunt, living all alone in the middle of the country, greets them with open arms. Except that she is a vampiric witch, and employs both the house and all of the objects within it, in order to kill any unmarried females who dare to step within its walls. Auntie feeds off their life, and exchanges bodies and spirits so that she has possession of their identity as well.

What would normally be a relatively straightforward story of girls in peril, with a tragic backstory, turns into a child-like hallucinatory horror movie that comes off like a nightmare version of Sesame Street on acid. Much like Sesame Street's shorts, Obayashi uses everything under the sun to convey a child's heightened emotionality as well as blunter sense of the world. There's split frames, frames within frames, irises, deep focus, natural settings, matte backgrounds, blue screen, silent film, black and white, stop motion, practical effects, frame coloring, drawing on the frame, animation, slow motions, speed-ups, smash cuts, musical numbers...the list of everything that is in House is practically a compendium of cinematic techniques that were available at the time. A use of a few of those techniques go a long way, but House dares to include all of them.

That's not to say that the effects were all successful. Obayashi intended for the movie to look like a child's playtime machinations, with a sense that this isn't a mature adult making mature a movie for adults but a child communicating a child's experience. This child is explaining that she has a fear of a variety of things, including futons, pianos, clocks, reflections, cats, adults, and watermelons.

In order to properly enter this world, and take it as it wants to be taken, the viewer must turn himself into a child and turn off their preconceived notions of what a film actually should be like. Watching the film as an adult expecting a straightforward horror movie filled with adult creeping terrors around the corner is quickly obliterated by the opening, where a blue line outlines a box in the frame, and the cartoonish title treatment speaks the name "House" before eating you.

This type of whimsy continues through an opening scene where our heroine, Gorgeous, meets her stepmother. The scene seems like it is in the balcony of a spacious and stylish apartment with a matte painting backdrop of a setting sun makes it more 1980s Moonlighting than actually resembling a realist movie set. Any pretense at being realistic is dropped soon after when her new stepmother floats in from the side, with an invisible wind making her hair and her scarf trail her. It's heightened drama and setting, but it's so effective at setting a dreamy atmosphere that when we get to the schoolyard scenes that follow, the realism is drastically jarring. The school scenes are filmed in a style most reminiscent of any 1970s back to school special.

Given Obayashi's background in advertising, it's no surprise that House is as impeccable as it is inconceivable. The framing of the scene from the left with a giant pair of lips haunting the girls is stunning and amateur both. It's just off center, with the lips being the center of a frame that seems to have moved off to the left. The various odd sources of lighting are too hot in certain areas (notably the girl's butt), but still dramatic and creepy in the realm of the classical noirs. Compare that to the earlier frame of the head in the well, where the matte painting background gives everything an illusion of deepest focus, and the whole frame is lit and filmed like a classical watercolor painting. Which looks completely different to the neo-realist schoolyard scenes which feature no matte paintings and seem to even use a different film stock. Etc. But, they're all impeccably used, in an amateurish manner.

House doesn't have any pretense about being anything other than a film about 7 young girls in danger. Sure, it has some cultural allusions WWII and the bomb, and how the older generation is trying to cope with a younger generation who knows absolutely nothing about that earlier war and the destruction that was wrecked upon Japan as a result. From a child's perspective, though, that means nothing and the real source of fear are in the odd objects of the house. This is an art object. It's an experience. You're meant to laugh with it, and be scared by it. It's comedic, horrific, childlike and silly. But, most of all, it's different. This is primarily for experiencing something you haven't experienced since Sesame Street, put into a horror movie. It's an astounding film.

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977): Randomness is not Scary

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

dir: John Boorman

This week of "Outside a Director's Wheelhouse" returns to 1977, with a sequel of truly epic proportions. It's almost hard to imagine that cocaine didn't play a part in the making of this movie. Alcohol was definitely a part of this movie, as Richard Burton is constantly drunk or in the throes of DTs for the course of this movie, but the film was subjected to the hands of John Boorman.

John Boorman had leapt to fame with Point Blank in 1968, and then Deliverance in 1972. Deliverance was a nominee for Best Picture and Best Director. And, then John Boorman lost it. Boorman followed Deliverance with the Sean Connery-in-a-harness sci-fi psychadelic Zardoz, but not being satisfied with having lose his mind with Zardoz, he was hired on to do Exorcist II: The Heretic.

There were plenty of problems facing Exorcist II. The first problem is that Linda Blair didn't want to be in makeup again, so we couldn't have her play as a possessed made up demon. The second is that neither William Friedkin (featured earlier with The Boys in the Band) nor William Peter Blatty (the author) wanted to do a sequel. So, we're left with John Boorman creating a film from a screenplay by William Goodhart. Or, at least the original form of the script was by William Goodhart.

Boorman was unsatisfied with the screenplay, and told Goodhart to rewrite it, incorporating ideas from Rospo Pallenberg (who would work with Boorman on Excalibur and The Emerald Forest). When Goodhart refused, Boorman and Pallenberg worked on their own, and were constantly rewriting the script as shooting went on. Linda Blair has gone on record saying the end product was nothing like the original screenplay.

So, what are we left with?  Well, I don't quite know. The plot is practically incomprehensible. The film opens with Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) visiting an African native village where a young girl, who had been claimed to be a healer, being possessed by a demon and then spontaneously combusting during the exorcism. His followup assignment is to investigate the death of Father Merrin, aka the priest that was killed in the original movie.

Meanwhile, Regan (Linda Blair) is now a tap-dancing psychic who is going to a psychiatrist who helps sick children. The psychiatrist believes that the demon hasn't been exorcised, but has merely been repressed. The shrink uses a biofeedback machine that syncs up people's subconscious thoughts in a trance. She uses the machine with Regan, but ends up with heart palpatations, as demon Regan is trying to kill her through their mutual subconscious.

Meanwhile, there is something about how the world is starting to telepathically link to everybody, and Regan can link to other people. And there is something about Father Merrin successfully exorcising a young African boy, who grows up to be James Earl Jones. And something about how Pazuzu only attacks people who have healing powers, as James Earl Jones is now a doctor. There's also a connection between Pazuzu and locusts, with some sort of spinning ball that prevents caterpillars from turning into locusts, probably by disrupting the swarming communications. 

OK, if you can figure out what's going on in this movie, more power to you. I don't need my movies spelled out for me, but if you're going to give me 2 hours of random shots and then call it a plot, I hope that it makes sense without having to drop acid. And, the scenes should actually be scary! But, they're not. They mainly range from average to terrible, with fairly frequently dips into hilarity.

There's Linda Blair's TWO tap dancing sequences, including the one where she is psychically attacked by stones and falls off the stage. There's Richard Burton finding a box of flaming oily rags in the basement of the shrink's building, and then attacking it with a wooden crutch. A flight of the grasshopper sequence where the locust is up close and personal, goes through Africa, and comes face to face with James Earl Jones in a locust outfit. The shrink's constant need to help other people while they're racing Burton and Blair to the house. One of my favorite scenes of all time is Linda Blair's helping out a girl with autism. 

The final cherry of insanity on this flaming pile of confusion is Morricone's score. I once read some wag comment that the score for Exorcist II was probably written in an evening soaking in the tub while drunk. It just feels like there was even director intervention on this score, and there is incomprehensible clashes in the score itself. The film opens with the score mainly consisting of a lady squealing and screeching in a stupidly psychic insanity playing over the titles. But, the credits end with a one last sudden shriek, as if she was stopped cold by a wall.  

The movie has been seen as ranging from terrible to amazing. Friedkin likened it to a car accident. But, Scorsese commented in 1978 that it surpassed the original. It is this latter comment that leads me to wonder if cocaine might be the key to enjoying this movie. That you have to be in a bit of a hyperactive frenzy yourself in order to see this absurd pile of shit as a good movie.

Me? I find Exorcist II hilarious. It's hard not to laugh at Linda Blair tap dancing funny. Or her almost falling off a roof, screaming then passing it off non-chalantly. Or, James Earl Jones' locust costume, as if he's in the rejected version of Blind Melon's video for "No Rain." The movie is a laugh riot to me. Many of my friends think it is just a purely awful movie. They're wrong. This is hilarious.

New York, New York (1977): Spousal Abuse is the Key To Success

New York, New York (1977)
dir: Martin Scorsese

The 1970s were a dark time for Martin Scorsese. Or, rather, they were a white time. Martin Scorsese was breaking up with his second wife, and buried up to his ears in cocaine. In this atmosphere, Martin Scorsese decided to make his second movie that deals with spousal abuse (after Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), and also decided that he would make it a musical. YAY!!!

Yes, New York, New York reeks of cocaine, and also is starting to show the sexual relations that Scorsese would later exploit in Raging Bull. Scorsese and Robert DeNiro (his muse at the time) teamed up to make a musical about the 1940s, an era where the men came back from war, abused their wives, and big band disappeared.

In New York, New York, Robert DeNiro plays a big band saxophone player who later becomes the band leader. He meets Liza Minnelli, a USO singer, in an 18-minute long opening scene where DeNiro continually harasses Minnelli until she finally rejects him, even after her friend has gone with his friend to DeNiro's hotel room. Of course, that means that Minnelli and DeNiro meet up at the hotel room when she picks up her friend, and he tries to return to his room. And, off we go on an epic 2hr43min journey of love, pregnancy, control, music, and abuse.

New York, New York is unabashedly unpleasant. DeNiro starts out as just a sleazeball with mildly aggressive temper tantrums. Yet, Liza falls for DeNiro...because he's talented? Or because she's a weak character? It's never fully explained. But, they go off on the road with DeNiro rising to the top, and Minnelli is singing her way to the top as well.

Eventually, Minnelli and DeNiro fuck, get married, get pregnant, return to New York, fight, bicker, and lose each other for several years leaving Liza to raise her son on her own while she works as an usher. Until she becomes famous in a number called "Happy Endings," and uses DeNiro's new number, "Theme from New York, New York" (yes, it's called that in the movie) to rocket her career. DeNiro calls her and its hinted that she may take him back.

New York, New York is Scorsese's ode to the the musical genre. In the commentary, Scorsese says that he's criticizing the male characters in many of the musicals, who are shown as likable heroes. He believes that they were masking the competitions, envy, and jealousy and making everything happier. Scorsese claims that he wanted to make DeNiro as unlikable as possible in order to criticize the musicals of the era.

But, he fails. Hard. This isn't much of a critique. It directly references other movies, but he just throws one completely unlikable character into the formula. This monkey wrench makes the whole movie unbearable. One of the reasons people don't mind, and even fall for, charming irresponsible people is because they're CHARMING. Take out the charming, and all you have is an asshole. Scorsese is basically saying that people will fall for assholes as long as they're talented. And, worse, women are weak characters who will fall for abusive sleazeballs with anger problems.

The irritating problem is...he's mildly right. I've seen first hand that some women will fall for men with anger problems, and even marry them and have a child with them. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for a pleasant experience. When DeNiro, on their first...um...date(?), yells at Liza and tells her to forcefully sit down, she still sticks around in order to duet with him and launch their success. The audience is left wondering why she's still there.

Does every movie have to be pleasant?  No.  But, almost 3 hours of a movie asking us to celebrate the success of both DeNiro and Minelli while also showing how ugly these characters are goes way past the point. At 2.75 hours, New York, New York is also longer than most of the movies that Scorsese references. Blue Skies is 104 minutes long. Meet Me in St Louis is 108 minutes. Singin' in the Rain is 103 minutes. Only Judy Garland's A Star is Born runs longer at 176 minutes. All of those movies have characters that are infinitely more pleasant and makes it easy to embrace the musical. In New York, New York, the audience finds itself rooting for everybody to die so we can meet some people who are interesting, or at least likable.

This isn't What's Love Got To Do With It? or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore where Scorcese is critiquing DeNiro's character. This isn't even 1980's Raging Bull where Jake LaMotta is shown as an emotionally self-destructive character and the wives are actually collateral in the destruction. The abuse in New York, New York is shown to be part and parcel of DeNiro's sleazeball character that people put up with.

Scorsese actually does succeed in one thing, however. He succeeds in recreating the look and style of many of the movies he is directly referencing. His use of studio backlots, and closed sound stages captures the old feeling of movies that used to evoke feelings of happiness and joy. His use of Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, doubles down on those references. If you just watch it as an essay on other films, you may have a better time. But, even for that, 163 minutes is a long fucking time to be watching a montage of other films.

Scorsese even has an 11 minute sequence called Happy Endings, where the cocaine literally ends up on the screen in the titles of the musicals Liza is fantasizing about being in. Happy Endings is bizarre as it is a fantasy within a fantasy that ends up as a fantasy and rolls between reality, dreams, stage, and screen. It is just incomprehensible unless you realize it is practically a commentary on Broadway Melody Ballet from Singin' In The Rain which was, itself, a commentary on long musical sequences that existed in the other movies.

So, what are we left with?  163 minutes of joyous spousal abuse and talent leading to successful careers in a movie that is actually an essay on other movies. If that's what you want to watch, then this movie is probably successful. It's not a poorly constructed movie. But, the core goal of the film is a cocaine-addled failure of a goal. Making any movie where you're supposed to be rooting for mean-spirited assholes and naive nitwits is bad enough (most recently, this was embodied by Bachelorette), but then making a 3 hour journey? It tempts one to live in a forest.

Scorsese never made another musical. Thank God.

The Spell (1977): Carrie with chants

Tubbo?  Really?

The Spell (1977)
dir: Lee Philips

One criticism that people have rightly had about Carrie is that Carrie's Mom is over-the-top.  Carrie never had a real great life, and it is one of the disservices to the real lives of kids who are bullied. Carrie never gets a respite, but some do. Another criticism is that Carrie never seems to really deserve it, and thus generates more empathy than a usual outcast. The Spell fixes those problems, but creates a whole slew of others.

The Spell was a tv movie rip off of Carrie, with the basis of a girl who feels like an outcast using telekinetic powers to exact revenge on those around her.  The Spell knows it is ripping off Carrie, and even uses the same type of dreamy flute music periodically that defines the romantic dream-like scores of Carrie.  But, The Spell is also limited by its being a tv movie.

The Spell is about Rita, a girl who may be a size 9 or something to make her a little overweight as a 15-year-old girl.  When the film opens, however, she is picked on as fat, called Tubbo and Moby Dick. And, today was rope climbing day, which Rita couldn't manage.  However, her primary tormentor taunts her by doing fucking aerial rope tricks like spinning around,  and eventually falls and dies.

The next scene is set months in advance and the father is telling Rita not to go for the second helping of waffles because she's fat.  And, so is the basis for Rita.  She's fat.  She can also be kind of bitchy in the way that all teenagers are.  She goes out for a walk instead of making dinner like she was asked. She gets mad at her sister for beating her in a breath holding contest, and other such things.  But, her mom is torn between protecting Rita and raising Rita.  She wants to protect Rita from bullies, but then she wants Rita to grow up right.  And, as a parent, that's a hard line.

That is the main way that The Spell differentiates itself from Carrie, by giving her a decent home life. Well, decent-ish.  Her father and sister seem to be united against Rita from the beginning of the movie. More her father than her sister.  I think Rita is mainly jealous that her sister has good looks and is athletic while Rita is just plain Rita.  Rita isn't given any qualities outside of being fat, telekinetic, and doing needlepoint.

Rita also attacks weird people.  Like her father's business associates?  And her father himself.  It isn't a Rita against the school movie like Carrie, nor does it have the disaster mass murder finale that Carrie delivers, providing the same type of catharsis that a movie like The Final delivers.  The Spell is firmly happy with keeping its intents low.  Especially when the finale is mainly two people chanting under their breath at each other.  Oy.

Beyond that, however, the realism is well worth it, and you might as well check it out if you're tired of re-watching Carrie.  It tackles fat shaming, and offers an imperfect protagonist, in order to make everything feel that bit more real and a little less over the top.