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

Django, Prepare a Coffin (1968)

Hard to believe I’ve been writing reviews for this long and have never tackled a Western (Spaghetti or otherwise).  Why, you ask?  Well, several reasons.  The Western is a very special genre to me (Once Upon a Time in the West is in my top five of all time), and I was reticent to dive in on one because I wanted to do whatever the selection would be justice (time and about another nine hundred words will tell the tale on that one).  Second, and more important, I wanted the film I wrote about to be worth the time.  I had been hovering around reviewing Little Rita of the West (coincidentally, also a Ferdinando Baldi film), but that film’s run time made it a bit more difficult to squeeze into my schedule (you’d think a guy so devoted to film would make the time, but there you have it).  Thankfully, Arrow Films have come through again with Django, Prepare a Coffin (aka Preparati la Bara! aka Viva Django aka Get the Coffin Ready aka Django Sees Red), so the choice was taken away from me.  Their transfer is gorgeous, as always, though the special features are thin (yet filling), including a trailer and an overview of the Django films by Kevin Grant (author of Any Gun Can Play).  Still, if you’re a fan of the genre, this film is good (notice I didn’t say great) but worth owning simply by virtue of the fact that it exists in such nice shape.

Django (Terence Hill) and his crew are ambushed while transporting a gold shipment.  Django is shot, and his wife is brutally killed.  Years later, Django is employed as a hangman, but secretly he is gathering the falsely accused people he actually doesn’t hang to help him get payback on Lucas (George Eastman) and his henchmen.  And what has Django’s old buddy Dave Barry (Note: not the writer, but still played by Horst Frank) have to do with this (I’ll bet you can’t guess)?

I am a huge fan of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, and I realize that a cottage industry of films named for (but rarely having anything to do with) it enjoyed much success in Italy and abroad.  Django, Prepare a Coffin is one of the handful of films that does actually relate to its progenitor, though it hews far enough away to be its own film.  Mainly, this is a tonal difference, specifically, the difference between Hill and the earlier movie’s Franco Nero.  Nero’s Django was a somber, haunted man.  He dragged his own coffin around with him, and inside it was death (both his and other’s).  He was as much the grim reaper as he was a man starving for (perhaps denying himself) peace.  Hill’s Django is more amiable.  He has a pal in Barry, and his big dream is to settle down and “wait for the last judgment.”  More notably, this Django is happily married, a state which seems foreign to the character as depicted by Corbucci and company.  Even after he sets himself on his path of vengeance, Hill gives the character a certain goofball charm, which, let’s face it, is Hill’s stock in trade.  He plays with the local telegraph operator’s (his other friend) pet bird, offering it booze and conversing with it.  He also has an openly virtuous spirit.  While he is using his “deadman” gang to take revenge for himself, it feels as though he would have helped these people avoid the hangman’s noose, regardless.  He’ll gun a man down, but he’s so not stoic it feels slightly out of character.  It left me thinking that this was actually a prequel or origin story for the man from the 1966 film.

Prepare a Coffin likewise shares its screenwriter (Franco Rossetti), director of photography (Enzo Barboni), and producer (Manolo Bolognini) with Corbucci’s movie.  This provides another throughline between the two films, but the character is clearly the same, just different.  He still wears his heavy, dark Inverness coat (but significantly, he doesn’t don it until after his wife is gone).  He still has his huge, belt-fed machine gun.  He still suffers some hand injuries (though not nearly as mutilated as before) prior to turning the tables on his enemies.  Mostly, he is still heavily associated with death.  He figuratively buries himself next to his wife.  He’s a hangman, a legal dealer of death.  He is shown often digging graves.  The finale of the film takes place in a cemetery (again).  He’s as ghoulish as a man as can be, but Hill makes him goshdarned likeable.  Unfortunately, the two tastes don’t quite taste great together.  It’s tough to pull off being death incarnate and a swell guy at the same time, and this movie proves it.  This Django rebels against his loner stereotype.  He wants a family, he wants a community, he strives too stridently to not be alone in the world.  He’s Django Lite.

The film still deals with Western genre themes.  It primarily concerns itself with the struggle to civilize the frontier.  What’s interesting here is its attitude regarding it.  Dave Barry and men like him have an air of respectability to them (he is an elected representative at the film’s opening).  He has money, he has status, and these give him power.  He is civilizing the West and killing it.  These aren’t cross purposes, they are the same purpose.  The socioeconomic status of men like Barry and Lucas is directly proportional to the level of their turpitude.  Moreover, it’s the greedy like Barry and Lucas who carelessly destroy the lives of the working men and women who actually endeavor to civilize the frontier in less exploitive fashion (of course, we can argue that such a feat is impossible), to live their simple lives.  Moneyed land barons and the like are nothing new in Westerns, but Barry’s political background gives his villainy a more far-reaching touch.  Guys like Garcia (Jose Torres) just want to be with their families.  Nevertheless, once gold enters the picture it’s a short trip to becoming exactly like the opposition and rationalizing it.  Naturally, only Django is incorruptible, giving his hanging fees to the men he emancipates.  He, then, is the true civilizing agent, selfless and self-determined.  He wants to give what was taken from him to others.  The problem is, most other people haven’t (or won’t) come around to his way of thinking.  And that’s life.

MVT:  Baldi is a solid director.  Though much of the film has a certain flat, stagy look (which harkens back to more traditional, classic American Westerns), it moves along nicely and has enough interesting turns to be worthy of its genre.

Make or Break:  Django trying to get a bird to drink.  It just doesn’t feel right.

Score:  6.25/10

Blood Shot (2013)

Directed by: Dietrich Johnston
Run Time: 96 minutes

All you had to do was be entertaining movie. One simple job that you were well equipped to carry out. You had explosions, guns, a stupid premise to use guns and explosions, and a vampire. Instead you pass off shit writing as comedy and any joy that could be found is beaten to death with horrible direction. Let's get through this trainwreck.

The story is centered around Detective Hellsing. A cop who has devoted his life to destroying evil by destroying his marriage, being a joke with other cops, and learning how to kill vampires from websites online. Why did he become the self appointed guardian against evil? That is never addressed as Detective Hellsing gets anonymous tip where the vampire will strike next. Across town an Islamic terrorist cell is getting ready to carry out a round of suicide bombing in various US cities. Before the cell can spread terror throughout America the vampire shows up and wipes out the terror cell.

Detective Hellsing enters the scene just as the last terrorist is killed. The detective enacts his mission of destroying evil by using a grab bag of vampire lore and seeing what will work. Silver bullets hurt the vampire, crucifixes can repel and injure, and a wooden stake to the heart and sunlight are lethal. After throwing the detective around for a bit, the vampire activates all the explosives in the building and flees the scene. Leaving Detective Hellsing to escape the as the building explodes.

The nameless vampire works for the C.I.A.'s vampire division. Which is a dark office set were Lance Henriksen is chain smoking. The current target that President Christopher Lambert wants eliminated is a terrorist master mind with a bad joke name that everyone just call him Bob. Bob, played by Brad Dourif, is assembling a super league of terrorists to destroy America and it's vampire assassin. Bob has acquired a powerful jinn/djinn and has smuggled his terrorist pals, his harem, and five little people who are expert miners with student visas.

Meanwhile Detective Hellsing's life has gotten worse. His vampire obsession has gotten him fired, his wife is ready to move from trial separation to full on divorce, and the league of super terrorist have kidnapped his soon to be ex wife. So Mr. Hellsing sets aside his war on evil and teams up with the vampire to rescue his soon to be ex wife and defeat the terrorists. However this plays right into the super terrorists plans as they need the vampire to be the host for the jinn. The jinn is used to steals some material to make a weapon of mass destruction and Mr Hellsing is forced to return the jinn to his prison.

It looks like the heroes are going to save the day when an explosion fatally wounds Mr. Hellsing and the vampire. The vampire bites Mr. Hellsing making him into a vampire and to reveal the plot twist of the movie. The vampire was the anonymous source as a means of training Mr. Hellsing as the vampire's replacement. With all the dumb exposition out of the way, the vampire dies and Mr. Hellsing becomes the big damn hero (TM) and saves the day.

 This was a dumb movie. The jokes were badly written, badly executed, and only there to pad out the run time. At some point in the creative process they was an interesting movie but the writer/director managed to screw it up. Christopher Lambert's scenes are shot in a limo and feels like it was filmed as he was on his way to airport to get the away from this movie. Lance Henriksen's scenes feel more like he just stopped giving a fuck and just wanted his day of filming to be over. Brad Dourif and the rest of the cast did their best with the shoddy plot but there is not enough polish in the world to make shit look like gold. If you find this movie please avoid it. It's joyless, flawed, and a mess of a movie.

MVT: Towards the end of the film there is some impressive practical effects. Yes I am reaching for something of value on this movie.

Make or Break: Three things broke this movie. A plot that brings up and forgets things in favour of making a dumb joke. The vampire who can't make up his mind if he's a bad ass assassin or Sam the Eagle from The Muppets. And using CGI as a crutch instead of a tool.

Score: 0.5 out of 10

American Chinatown (1996)

When I lived in Philadelphia, my roommate and I were heavily into Hong Kong cinema (or, at least, we thought we were; there were enthusiasts who eclipsed us, then and now).  The Western world was just getting on the Woo, Lam, etcetera bandwagon, and we were no different.  Of course, we had both seen plenty of martial arts films when we were young (giving us an appreciation and a love for the works of filmmakers like Chang Cheh, Lau Kar-leung, and so on), but these new(er) films were something altogether different.  Sure, the plots and characters were relatively the same.  The difference lay in the technical aspects.  The camerawork was kinetic and inventive, while still clearly telling a story, and the stunt work was on another level.  They felt insane and viscerally real at the same time.

Now, I had heard of Keith Li’s Centipede Horror from one of the grey market VHS catalogs I had sent away for (remember those?), and it seemed right up my alley.  After all, it was a horror movie, no?  It’s right there in the title.  My roommate and I went on down to Chinatown and opened an account at a small, Chinese video/grocery store (around the area of the Trocadero on Arch Street, but I’m not totally clear on the exact location, not that it matters all that much).  The first two tapes we rented that day were Stanley Tong’s Swordsman 2 and Centipede Horror.  We both loved Swordsman 2 (despite those weird scenes of the characters singing like they were doing whip-its all day long), but I don’t think we made it more than thirty minutes (if that) through Centipede Horror before we popped the tape out.  The film was grotty and dumb and made little to no sense.  See, we were used to only a portion of Asian cinema, and this was everything that was not.  Having now immersed myself a bit more in the multitude of Asian cinema offerings, I’ve always meant to revisit Centipede Horror to see if there’s anything redeeming about it.  I do not, however, need to ever rewatch Richard Park’s (aka Woo-sang Park) American Chinatown because I now know how little redemptive value it has.

Lily (Liat Goodson) is the victim of an attempted gang rape, but the cholos attempting it are thwarted and roughed up by Yong (Tae-joon Lee, billed here as simply Taejoon, as if he were Taimak or Gerardo [both apt descriptors]).  As their love sort of blossoms, Yong goes about his gang business under the leadership of fellow one-time orphan (what is with Park and orphans, anyway?) Eric (Robert Z’Dar).  But Yong’s twin paths come into direct conflict with each other, and only one can be followed to happiness (or something, in theory).

Park’s Miami Connection is a film which has recently been rediscovered, resurrected, and regaled by hipsters, cult cinema lovers, and trash junkies the world over.  It’s fun because, even when it’s being serious, there’s a level of naïve optimism (sure, the members of Dragon Sound were all “orpans,” but they were also the members of Dragon Sound, a band whose enthusiasm and subject matter make The Wiggles look like G.G. Allin) that’s infectious.  The same cannot be said for American Chinatown.  This film is self-serious and cloyingly melodramatic while toying with the tropes of badass cinema (most particularly Heroic Bloodshed films) which it doesn’t completely understand.  Yes, there are plenty of fights, and these, at least, are handled well enough in the choreography department.  Park, thankfully, also shoots many of these scenes wide enough to see what’s going on and to appreciate the physical talents of the performers.  Where Park fails is in creating empathy for his characters and in crafting believable (even for a film like this) interpersonal moments and relationships between said characters (not good in a movie which relies upon them so heavily).  Some examples of the choice dialogue.  “You don’t want a guy like me!”  “College frat boys don’t turn you on anymore?”  “Why are you doing this to me?”  “You’re my only hope and dream.”  All of this is delivered with the conviction of a dish rag (though Z’Dar does an admirable job working with nothing, as usual).  I should stop there.  I don’t want people to get the wrong idea and want to see this movie (I suspect there are those who would want to, regardless).

Nearly every scene in American Chinatown could (and maybe should) start with a title card reading, “Suddenly…!”  The movie opens like a case of whiplash with the three cholos (I kept thinking of Mike Muir from Suicidal Tendencies; Sorry, Mike) already well into their assault on Lily.  Suddenly…!  Yong appears out of nowhere to save the day.  Suddenly…!  Yong battles two urban samurai types and a kabuki guy.  For no reason I could discern and with no impetus for this encounter.  Yong is stabbed in the guts.  Suddenly…!  He’s living on a boat somewhere, and God only knows how much time has passed.  Yong beats villain Wong (Sung-Ki Jun).  Suddenly…!  He’s attacked by two other henchmen (this is not the order in which things are done, Mr. Park), who may be the samurai guys he fought before, maybe not.  The entirety of this film is just pieces thrown together like this.  But if I want to watch random stuff for a couple of hours, I can go on Youtube.  At least there I could get suggestions for other videos that might be of interest.

The males in this film are very, very male, indeed.  Yong always kicks first, asks questions later.  He always wears sunglasses, indoors and out, day or night.  He’s meant to be a real cool cat, but he comes off like a flipping jerk.  Eric talks and acts like a kid playing at tough guy.  He’s also wishy-washy, though this isn’t because he’s volatile; the writing is just bad.  Wong and his goons are as unmemorable as you can get.  They show up every few minutes for a fight scene, and that’s it.  Jim (Bobby Kim) comes close to having something to do as a mentor to Yong and a foil for Eric, but he, too, ultimately plays like just another sad sack.  And then there’s poor Lily.  Jane (Kathy Collier) in Miami Connection was an ancillary character (think the Daphne to Dragon Sound’s Scooby Gang), but she was still a more active part of that film than Lily is here.  Lily exists solely to look good, be sexually assaulted by men, and be saved by Yong.  There’s one excruciatingly implausible “subplot” involving her “sisterly” relationship with Eric (and how in the hell do Yong and Lily not realize that they both know Eric if they’re both supposed to be so goddamned close to him?), but it blows in the wind like everything else interesting in this film might have done but didn’t.  It’s tough for me to decide what’s worse, watching American Chinatown or watching a mouthful of centipedes spew out of people’s mouths.  But I definitely know which way I’m leaning.

MVT:  The fight scenes are okay.  And plentiful.

Make or Break:  The opening scene is jarring, confusing (at first), and surreal in the suddenness with which everything happens.

Score:  4/10