Wilder Napalm (1993)

I used to frequent a pizza place that, to this day, has never been topped, and no one I ever talk to is even aware of its existence.  The place is called Mama’s Pizzeria, and it is located on Belmont Avenue in Philadelphia.  It’s in an inconspicuous building with limited parking.  The hours of operation are also odd (hey, maybe the joint is a front; Considering the quality of the eats, who am I to judge?).  Inside, there is a small room for takeout orders and a couple of tables for people to dine.  Up a narrow stairway is the main dining room.  I never once ordered a pizza from Mama’s, but I also never needed to.  Rather, they make what is, in my opinion, the single best cheesesteak in the universe.  This delicacy was a little over a foot long, and for around ten dollars, it had more meat and cheese than you can comfortably fit into a human stomach (and colon).  I used to order these things, and it was all I would eat for a weekend.  I don’t know if the caliber of their cheesesteaks has held up some twenty-odd years later, but just the thought of one of those things makes me hungry even now (and I just ate).  The reason I’m promoting cheesesteaks from Mama’s in a review of Glenn Gordon Caron’s Wilder Napalm is because the restaurant had nothing but clown art decorating its walls, and in this film, one of the characters is a clown by profession (a thin connection, sure, but that’s expected from me).  That, and I miss Mama’s cheesesteaks and wanted to extoll their virtues.

Wilder and Wallace Foudroyant (adjective – Striking as with lightning; sudden and overwhelming in effect; stunning; dazzling) haven’t seen each other in five years.  Wilder (Arliss Howard) has a crummy job, but he is also a volunteer firefighter.  His wife Vida (Debra Winger) is a firebug who is due up for release from her house arrest in a few days.  Brother Wallace (Dennis Quaid) is a circus clown who rolls into town on his way to The Big Time and stirs up old resentments and tensions.  And both brothers are pyrokinetic.

Aside from the basic idea of sibling rivalry, the film deals with the dueling desires for normality and notoriety.  Wilder craves a quiet life.  He wears a tie and jacket to work at a Fotomat knockoff in an empty parking lot (guess where the circus sets up shop).  He volunteers to call BINGO at the local rec center (the film is set in Midlothian, and I assume it’s the one in Virginia, not Scotland).  When he is paged to a fire, he stops to hang his jacket on a hanger and lock the work booth door behind him.  To lose control is unacceptable because it irresponsible.  The exception to that rule is when he has sex with Vida, which can get pretty wild, apparently.  Wallace, of course, is the antithesis of Wilder.  He uses his power freely, zapping flies, melting air conditioners, and so forth.  He wants to be famous, to be “somebody.”  His big dream is to appear on Late Night with David Letterman and get rich.  Wallace likes to have fun.  When Vida’s house arrest is over, it’s Wallace who takes her out on the town.  Vida, being the tether between the two, responds to both positively.  She has genuine affection for Wilder and appreciates that he’s a solid guy (he lost a decent job because of her but never resented her for it), though she also feels constrained in their relationship to some degree.  By that same token, she’s attracted to the wild side of Wallace, who knows what she likes.  She is a musician (a cellist, not a rock ‘n roller), and she loves hanging out on top of her and Wilder’s trailer home.  She sets fires just to get the fire crew to come to her house, so she can see Wilder (she’s also an arsonist, thus explaining why she’s enthralled by the Brothers Foudroyant).  The thing about the brothers’ antagonism is that neither is one hundred percent wrong.  Wilder thinks that exposing their powers will only bring harm to them both (“You read Firestarter, didn’t ya?!”) on top of the physical dangers of it (there is a very good reason for this).  Wallace realizes that he and his brother are unique, and, if done correctly, his gift can be used to benefit himself.  The two are so dug in on their positions, that they can’t see the value of the other’s perspective.

For my money, Wilder Napalm could easily have been one of the first Marvel Comics theatrical releases (you know, if it had anything whatsoever to do with Marvel).  Screenwriter Vince Gilligan (who would write quite a few episodes of The X-Files but is far better known for creating and executive producing Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) and director Caron (also a television alumnus, having created Moonlighting and Medium) understand what makes Marvel’s characters work so well, even if they don’t refer directly to them.  That is, they are people who have real problems to deal with on a daily basis who also just so happen to be superheroes (Wallace has a costume for his Dr. Napalm alter ego, and Wilder sort of gets one by the end).  The most interesting things in Marvel comic books are usually not the obligatory slugfests but the interactions between the characters as they wend their way through their melodramatic lives (true to fashion, this movie contains both).  Borrowing heavily from the famous Stan Lee wisdom of “…in this world, with great power there must also come - - great responsibility,” the filmmakers use the brothers as foils to illustrate this point.  Further, their powers are secondary to their interrelationships while also representing the core of what is between all three of them (when the brothers get worked up, things tend to melt and boil). 

The film is quirky in both good and bad ways.  Four firemen are also an acapella group who provide a chorus for Wilder (they sing a nice version of The Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”). Character actors Stuart Varney and M Emmett Walsh both turn up in small but effective roles as the circus owner and the fire chief, respectively.    There is the dry humor of Wilder’s character as he paces through his days (Arliss Howard has always excelled at this).  Winger is genuinely charming as the earnest free spirit.  Wallace, while in his clown persona of Biff, is both unsettling and a tad menacing.  That said, the fighting between the boys turns a little too slapstick at times (there is not only a bonk on the head from a pipe but also a fire extinguisher to the face).  Further, Quaid really overdoes the histrionics most of the time in an attempt to act funny, something which never works.  He even jumps up and down like Yosemite Sam at one point.  Still, the film is breezy, the pyrotechnics are truly impressive, and overall, it’s a very satisfying experience when it’s firing on all cylinders.

MVT:  The originality going on in the script (remember, this was 1993) is admirable.

Make or Break:  The finale cuts loose emotionally and physically, and even though, we know how it will turn out, it still works a treat.

Score:  7.25/10

Caveman (1981)

When I first considered reviewing Carl Gottlieb’s (co-screenwriter of JAWS) Caveman, I immediately thought of it in terms of comparisons to Eddie Cline and Buster Keaton’s Three Ages with the latter’s Stone Age segment.  I also assumed that the 1923 film was the earliest cinematic depiction of cavemen in comedic fashion (however, cavemen have been beating up dinosaurs in an adventurous vein on screen going, to my knowledge, as far back as 1912 in Man’s Genesis).  To absolutely no one’s surprise, I was wrong, and (to the best information my five minutes of research could cull) the earliest funny caveman movie was Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 short His Prehistoric Past (although it is feasible to disqualify it from this particular discussion, because it’s a short film [the same could be argued about the Keaton film, since that one is three short films cut together, but I digress], and because it’s not a straight up caveman film [I’ll let you spoil the particulars on this hundred-and-one year old film for yourself]).  Still, both of those films and Caveman (and the vast majority of prehistoric films) deal with a man standing up to a strong, evil tribal leader/rival in order to win the hand of the woman he loves (whether or not he realizes who that is).  To my mind, the reason this plot is so pervasive is because it is simple and primal.  It deals with the will to survive/dominate one’s world, and what could play to that better than killing giant beasts and taking the person you desire sexually?  Naturally, unlike something such as Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (which, of course, gave us arguably the world’s most famous fur bikini), Gottlieb’s film has to frustrate our protagonist Atouk (the unlikely, but brilliantly cast when you think about it, Ringo Starr) in comedic ways, even when his life is threatened.  But the basic themes are present, and they work well (as they work well in most of the subgenre just for being what they are).

Atouk is the runt of a clan ruled by Tonda (the late John Matuszak), and he desires Tonda’s voluptuous woman Lana (Starr’s real life spouse Barbara Bach, who proves here that even cavewomen knew how to crimp hair).  However, after being kicked out of the clan on a trumped up gross incompetence accusation, Atouk and friend Lar (Dennis Quaid), meet up with Tala (Shelley Long) and her blind friend, the elderly Gog (Jack Gilford, who, unsurprisingly threatens to steal the entire movie at times).  But while Tala has eyes for Atouk, Atouk still pines for Lana and hatches schemes to take her away from Tonda.

Caveman is one of those movies that exemplifies just exactly how far a PG rating could be stretched back in the early Eighties.  There is cleavage and fur-clad bums thither and yon.  There is toilet humor galore, including, but not limited to, an explosive fart gag, a fart in the face gag, and (most famously) a scene where characters literally dig through a pile of dinosaur shit.  Atouk gets goosed and molested by a sentient plant.  A dinosaur gets its genitals stimulated.  Perhaps most startling, our hero basically Rufies his desired and tries to get in her loins while she’s passed out.  Yet, this is handled so innocently, so desperately on the part of Atouk/Starr that it doesn’t play as offensively as it could have in another context.  Atouk genuinely has feelings for Lana (however wrongheaded they may be), and he has a sense of wide-eyed reverence for her (he offers her fruit he has squirreled away, while the rest of the tribe has failed to “bring home the Bronto”).  That I saw this at such an early age amazes me (well, not really; this would have attracted me just from the Chris Walas designed Abominable Snowman [played by Richard Moll] and David Allen’s stop motion dinosaurs [an obsession I’ve had since 1933’s King Kong and set in stone by The Valley of Gwangi, a film my uncle claims was made for kids who like to pull the wings off of flies, though I only half agree with that statement]).  That I understood all of it, including the “naughty” bits, is impressive and indicative of just how much can be conveyed through an extremely limited vocabulary (I still like saying “zug zug” from time to time), and pantomime/gestures (a filmic vocabulary created and refined in the silent era by luminaries such as those named in the first paragraph).

The film’s primary theme concerns itself with misfits and the coalition/power built around what many consider to be the dregs of society (yet another in the long, long list of things that I would argue harkens back to Tod Browning’s superlative Freaks).  As previously stated, Atouk is a runt.  Lar, who is good-looking and in relatively good health, is kicked out of the clan for hurting his leg (a wounded hunter-gatherer is a useless hunter-gatherer).  Gog is sightless and old.  Later on, Atouk will meet up with a black man, an Asian man (who, of course, is the only one who can speak fluent English), a little man, a gay couple, and various other throwaways.  Outside of those more clearly defined in their outsider status, the majority of the others in this makeshift tribe are closer in resemblance to Atouk.  They are slight of build, odd, shorter than normal, essentially square pegs.  Just as Atouk is the opposite of Tonda (weak versus strong, short versus tall, Ringo versus handsome, et cetera), Tala is the opposite of Lana.  She is blonde, skinny, small-chested, and quite intelligent (Lana may be intelligent as well, but her unwavering obeisance to Tonda marks her as a sheep, not a shepherd, so to speak).  In cinematic terms, this signifies Tala as “good” and the natural choice to be Atouk’s mate (in a Betty versus Veronica sort of way).  Atouk just needs to have his eyes opened, because even though he accepts these oddballs who have coalesced around him, his desire lies with the popular opinion of what a man should be and should want in a woman (be they cave or otherwise, and rather ironic considering Starr and Bach’s relationship off screen, but this is the movies where there is little difference between what’s “right” and what choices its traditional, underdog protagonist will make).  Atouk doesn’t want to be a misfit (hey, who does?), yet this is the exact thing he must embrace in order to triumph in his prehistoric world.

Caveman was released in America on DVD and Blu-ray via Olive Films, and it’s presented at 1.85:1 ratio.  The color palette of the film was never something that popped off the screen, but its hues look nice here, and the picture quality is as pristine as it can get.  The mono soundtrack is in English only (not that this movie would need much in the way of dubbing or subtitles), and it’s satisfying with every grunt and gaseous expulsion coming through loud and clear, but especially Lalo Schifrin’s jaunty score, which is so catchy, it will resound in your head for days (nay, years) after hearing it.  The disc includes a trailer for the film.

MVT:  I love the film’s light, slightly naughty tone.  You can slip into this film like a comfy pair of old slippers and just enjoy it like a pot of macaroni and cheese.

Make or Break:  The Make for me is the Ice Age scene.  Anyone who has read my reviews knows of my adoration for hirsute monsters, and the Snowman is a great costume.  Plus, the slapstick chase across the ice just works in spades, like something out of a Three Stooges short.  Sold!

Score:  7.5/10