I think it's fair to say that incredibly prolific cult filmmaker Jess Franco wrote and directed SHINING SEX (1977, Severin Films) as an excuse to closely examine the naked body of his lifelong love and artistic muse Lina Romay in what can only be described as loving detail.
Hence, the narrative consists of roughly 10% story and 90% naked Lina Romay, which is great if (a) you're really, really into Lina Romay, and (b) you enjoy just sitting back and watching compulsive film addict Franco getting his celluloid fix by thinking up different reasons to aim a camera at things.
Those things in this case would be parts of Lina Romay's body, which we get to know almost as intimately as her ob/gyn. In fact, this film goes a long way toward making up for the fact that I never had sex education classes in school. It's like an anatomical textbook in motion.
Of course, even Franco's simplest films usually have some kind of plot, and in this case it's the story of wildly popular nightclub dancer Cynthia (Romay), whose act consists of wearing next to nothing and rolling around on the floor in front of patrons like a kitty cat in heat, being taken to the luxurious home of an interested but strangely aloof couple.
Playfully seductive Cynthia strips off upon arrival and gets the woman, Alpha (Evelyne Scott), into bed for some girl-girl action while the man, Andros (Raymond Hardy) is supposedly off "putting the car away."
But whereas this is usually a prelude to naughty fun, we can see (even if Cynthia can't) that there's something very not right about Alpha's disaffected, almost robotic behavior.
Even her growing sexual arousal in response to Cynthia's efforts to engage her has an ominous feel to it, as the accompanying music itself sounds like something out of a Herk Harvey movie.
How much should I reveal about the rest of the plot? I like to watch movies like this without much foreknowledge, and in this case the mystery just made it that much more enjoyable. Suffice it to say that Franco takes a big left turn into sci-fi territory with elements of the mystical and the metaphysical.
All that, of course, is in service to the abundance of prolonged sex scenes, which get about as close to hardcore as I've seen in a Jess Franco movie. I'll even wager that this one would need extensive cuts to have been shown on Cinemax or the Playboy Channel back in the day.
Evelyne Scott (DEVIL'S KISS) is a commanding presence as Alpha. Monica Swinn (BARBED WIRE DOLLS) appears about halfway through as mystic Madame Pécame, who becomes involved in the paranormal goings-on along with Franco himself as Dr. Seward, head of a private psychiatric hospital. Also appearing are Olivier Mathot (THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME) and Elmos Kallman.
The 2-disc Blu-ray from Severin contains a CD of music from this and other Franco films. The uncensored print has been scanned from the original negative. Soundtrack is English 2.0 mono with English subtitles. A slipcover features different artwork than the box itself.
Bonus features include "In the Land of Franco, Part 3" with Stephen Thrower, an interview with Thrower entitled "Shining Jess", "Never Met Franco" with filmmaker Gerald Kikoine, "Filmmaker Christopher Gans on France", Commentary with scholars Robert Monell and Rod Barnett, some very explicit outtakes, and a trailer.
While the sci-fi angle gets nuttier (and the sex kinkier) as it goes along, there's always the spectacle of Jess Franco's beloved Lina languishing in the nude and getting ravished by everyone in sight. If you're not a Francophile, this will probably mean very little to you. But for those to whom every aspect of the director's career evokes endless fascination, SHINING SEX will prove evocative indeed.
2-Disc Blu-ray Featuring Limited Edition Slipcover Limited to 1500 copies
Currently watching: THE GREEN SLIME (1968), a collaboration between Italy, Japan, and the USA, with the disparate cinematic styles of each clashing together to create a wild space opera-slash-monster movie that's both exhilaratingly strange and delightfully bad.
Some time in the future an orbiting space station detects an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Commander Jack Rankin (TV star Robert Horton, "A Man Called Shenandoah", "Wagon Train") is called out of retirement to head a team of astronauts to take off from the space station, land on the asteroid, and plant bombs that will blow it to smithereens.
The team does so in what is basically a small-scale dry run for the later epic ARMAGEDDON, but this time the astronauts bring back an unexpected souvenir from the asteroid in the form of a strange green slime which, when charged with electricity, grows into a horde of grotesque, very hostile alien creatures with pincer-tipped tentacles and one big red eye.
Feeding upon the space station's various energy sources, the creatures grow in size and multiply rapidly until the station's inhabitants begin dying horribly one by one and end up fighting hand-to-tentacle for their very survival.
Hence, the entire second half of the film is a furious and at times incomprehensible series of frantic battle sequences splattered with red blood and green slime, as the space soldiers struggle to protect the station's medical and scientific personnel as well as other civilians.
To make matters worse, Rankin's romantic rival, Commander Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel, THE DIRTY DOZEN, STARMAN) chafes at having his command usurped by Rankin, with the mutual object of their affection, beautiful medical officer Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi, THUNDERBALL, MUSCLE BEACH PARTY), adding fuel to the fire with her very presence.
From the film's first scenes, we're treated to an environment almost totally comprised of miniatures--cityscapes, rocket launch pads and spaceships, the rotating space station itself, etc.--which sometimes approach the quality of the usual Toho/Kaiju stuff we're used to, while at other times are markedly cheap and fake-looking.
Space station and spaceship interiors have the low-budget look of the old live-action Saturday morning sci-fi shows from Filmation such as "Space Academy" and "Jason of Star Command", and even such earlier series as "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger." On the plus side, vivid colors abound in most scenes, especially those involving the approaching asteroid, giving them a pleasing comic-book quality.
The low-rent feel of the film also shows in the artless, almost amateurish direction and camerawork, which, combined with the freaky slime-monster costumes and other slapdash special effects, make the film either an object of boredom and derision or, for bad movie lovers such as myself, a delightfully dizzying wallow in junk-movie joy.
Amazingly, this movie was directed by the same man, Kinji Fukasaku, who would go on to helm the spectacular sci-fi classic BATTLE ROYALE in 2000. The consistently tense screenplay also boasts as its co-writer another familiar name--Bill Finger, who, along with Bob Kane, created the legendary comic book character, Batman.
Square-jawed and stern, Horton's Commander Rankin could almost have stepped right out of an episode of "Thunderbirds Are Go!" Jaeckle gets a rare chance to stretch his considerable acting chops in a major role, while Paluzzi has a cult appeal all her own as the woman who keeps the film's romantic triangle fired up while protecting her patients from the rampaging slime creatures.
While none of this looks or feels convincing for a second, THE GREEN SLIME is such a relentless onslaught of splashy, full-tilt space madness that one can hardly fail to enjoy it to some degree, on its own oddball terms, as an old-fashioned space opera laced with cheesy 1960s mod stylings and juvenile Monster Kid fun.
I watched an awful lot of afternoon TV back in the 80s, but I somehow missed out on "Transformers." (Although I did buy my nephew one of the toys for Christmas once.)
This half-hour cartoon series--some would call it an extended toy commercial--about the never-ending war for planet Earth between two opposing factions of intelligent shape-shifting robots named the Autobots and the Decepticons, who can all turn into various high-powered vehicles or cyber-creatures, ran from 1984-87 and garnered a fervent cult following for which it rated a feature-film treatment in 1986.
Thus, THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION) (Shout! Factory and Hasbro Studios, 2-disc Blu-ray) is a great way not only to catch up on what all the nostalgia's about but also to see it at what I assume to be its very best.
Even for a "Transformers" novice like myself, the 80s nostalgia that this rollicking animated space adventure radiates is intoxicating. It's old-school anime-style cel animation without the CGI gimmicks. Even if it sometimes betrays its TV origins, it looks fantastic. And it has a voice cast that's to short-circuit for.
The film opens with a pretty spectacular sequence in which a renegade planet-sized robot named Unicron (voiced by Orson Welles in his final film appearance) attacks a peaceful world populated by robots and ingests it for fuel. The artistic depiction of this massive global devastation is stunning, the first of several more upcoming scenes that will dazzle the viewer.
After a "Superman: The Movie"-style main titles sequence featuring the show's familiar theme song, we then settle into the story proper as our mechanical heroes, the Autobots, thunder into action to stave off an attack from the evil Decepticons in the far-off year of 2005.
No sooner is this action-packed battle over than Unicron shows up and transforms some of the surviving Decepticons into his own personal army with which to defeat the Autobots and steal from them an all-powerful device known as the Matrix of Leadership. Leonard Nimoy himself provides the voice for Unicron's duplicitous number-one, Galvatron (formerly Megatron), who covets the Matrix for himself.
An interesting side note: the deaths and transformations of several regular characters during this sequence are a result of the scripters' instructions to retire the old line of toys and replace them with new ones for young viewers to covet. This proved to be more traumatic for fans than anyone expected, especially the intensely dramatic death of the Autobots' leader, Optimus Prime, who passed the Matrix on to new leader Ultra Magnus (voiced by Robert Stack.)
The rest of the film is a robot vs. robot free-for-all with several cool detours along the way, including a visit to a junk planet with "Monty Python" alum Eric Idle voicing a comedic bot named "Wreck-Gar" who listens to too much Earth television, and an encounter with a race of grotesque mecha-beings whose main form of entertainment is to conduct kangaroo courts in which to sentence strangers such as Hot Rod (Judd Nelson) and Kup (Lionel Stander) to "death-by-sharkticon."
Dealing with these foes leads to the ultimate battle with Unicron (who turns out to be one huge transformer himself) and his dark forces which provides the film with its thrilling finale. By this time, I was finally starting to sort out all the many characters including good guys Hot Rod, Kup (he turns into a pickup--get it?), female robot Arcee, human Spike and his plucky son Daniel--both of whom also get to be transformers by wearing exo-suits--Bumblebee, Blurr, and the diminutive Wheelie.
Much comedy relief is provided by the Dinobots, who lack all social graces, talk in Bizarro-Speak ("Me, Grimlock, want to munch metal!"), and live for the times in which old soldier Kup regales them all with oft-told war stories ("Tell Grimlock about petro-rabbits again!") The Decepticons are also good for a few laughs when their inter-family squabbles escalate into all-out fights for dominance among the different robot clans.
Character design is good and the backgrounds are often beautiful. The musical score is okay when we aren't assaulted by bad 80s arena rock (I did enjoy hearing "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Dare to Be Stupid" at one point).
Dialogue ranges from likably dumb ("Your days are numbered now, Decepti-creeps!") to quite good, as in the numerous exchanges between Welles and Nimoy. Celebrity voice talent also includes Scatman Crothers ("Jazz"), Casey Kasem ("Cliffjumper"), Clive Revill ("Kickback"), Norm Alden ("Kranix"), and Roger C. Carmel ("Cyclonus"). Legendary voice performer Frank Welker takes on no less than six different roles.
The 2-disc Blu-ray set from Shout! Factory and Hasbro Studios gives us both the 1.85:1 widescreen version (disc 1) and the full screen version (disc 2) with English stereo and 5.1 sound and subtitles in English and Spanish. Remastered from a brand-new 4k transfer of original film elements. (A steelbook edition and a single-disc DVD edition with only the widescreen version plus digital copy are also available.)
Special features include a lengthy and highly-informative behind-the-scenes featurette entitled "'Til All Are One" (the segment on voice talent is especially fun), several other short featurettes, animated storyboards, trailers and TV spots, and an audio commentary with director Nelson Shin, story consultant Flint Dill, and star Susan Blu ("Arcee"). The cover illustration is reversible. Also contains the code for downloading a digital copy.
THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION) is good old bombastic meat-and-potatoes space opera for kids and adults alike, with a welcome anime flavor. It should rocket original fans of the show right back to their childhoods (or teenhoods, as the case may be) while gaining new ones such as myself who just love a good mind-expanding sci-fi adventure.
"So bad it's good" has a new name, and that name is SHOCKING DARK (Severin Films, 1989), a mind-rotting Italian sci-fi/horror fever dream from director Bruno Mattei and writers Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi.
As Drudi admits in an interview included on the Blu-ray, she and Claudio were hired to pen a direct rip-off of James Cameron's ALIENS and TERMINATOR, which would be released to theaters in time to cash in on Cameron's own upcoming TERMINATOR 2 (in some countries, they even used the same title along with copycat posters).
The main difference here, besides the rock-bottom budget, is that Mattei's film is set in scenic Venice as well as a genuine nuclear power plant, complete with control room, endless hallways, and massive machinery surrounded by walkways. It's a goldmine of found locations that add immeasurably to the production values.
Not that this makes SHOCKING DARK look like a lavish or even competent effort. The film is laughably bad from start to finish, with subpar performances and some really poor dialogue (some of which is lifted right out of ALIENS), and the big, scaly creatures that menace our heroes aren't far removed from the ones that stalked THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH.
And yet these very qualities are what make it such an involving experience. The story is about a future Venice that's so polluted it's uninhabitable, and a research company called Tubular that's working to solve the problem when something goes terribly wrong (something involving monsters, that is) and all contact with them is lost.
Enter this movie's version of Cameron's colonial marines to venture into Tubular's vast underground system of corridors, laboratories, etc. and try to sort things out along with a brainy civilian, Dr. Sara Drumbull (Haven Tyler), who will be our official equivalent of Ripley.
Part of the fun of SHOCKING DARK is spotting all the other equivalents, such as the female marine who reminds us of Vasquez, other soldiers who remind us of other ALIENS characters, and the Newt-like little girl Samantha who latches onto Sara (even though the actress playing her appears to be far past adolescence).
Last but not least, there's the member of the group who is secretly a robot (or "replicant") and will eventually stalk Sara and Samantha through the compound like a Terminator as the familiar countdown to self-destruct ticks away.
Whole scenes are copied, as when Samantha asks Sara, "Why do monsters exist?" during an intimate moment, right before they get locked in a lab with two of the slimy buggers while the traitor in the group turns off their surveillance camera. Earlier, victims of the initial attack are, as you might guess, found cocooned.
Things don't really take off until the final third when all the stalking and counting down to self-destruct begin. As a recorded voice reels off the elapsing seconds, Sara chugs through a series of Ellen Ripley/Sarah Connor moments until finally there's a rather unexpected time travel finale involving the one and only set built specifically for the movie.
SHOCKING DARK is one of those movies that's sort of beyond criticism since the worse it is, the more fun I have watching it. It's sincerely, almost creatively bad. The filmmakers set out to entertain, and in their own colorful, flamboyantly inept, and wholly inadvertent way, they pretty much did just that.
Buy it at Severin Films Special Features: Terminator in Venice – An Interview with Co-Director / Co-Screenwriters Claudio Fragasso and Co-Screenwriter Rossella Drudi Once Upon A Time in Italy – An Interview With Actress Geretta Geretta Alternate Italian Titles
(Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own.)
Originally posted on 1/27/20
If you like frenetic science-fiction-based anime with an emphasis on quirky teen relationships amidst a visual cacophony of robotic, city-smashing chaos, then Warner Bros. Home Entertainment's 2-disc Blu-ray FLCL: PROGRESSIVE & ALTERNATIVE COMBO PACK (Blu-ray+Digital) should keep you happily occupied for more than a few hours.
It's a two-season sequel to the original 2000 series about a wild young minx named Haruko who rides a Vesper and wields an electric guitar that doubles as a chainsaw, sledgehammer, and various other weapons and devices.
Young people in her vicinity tend to suddenly sprout raging robot monsters from their foreheads, which Haruko gleefully engages in battle with the fate of everything and everyone around her in the balance.
Season two, FLCL: PROGRESSIVE, gives us an appealing new cast of typical middle-school teens of the kind that will be familiar to anime fans, including pretty but pensive Hidomi, her eventual love interest Ide, and his pals Mori and Marco.
Hidomi is never without her headphones, which help block out the world around her, although they also have another, more mysterious purpose.
Into their everyday world blazes Haruko in the guise of a teacher, seducing Ide and drawing Hidomi under her influence to be used in bringing out inter-dimensional robot monsters for her to battle.
This time she has an alter ego in the form of super-cool Jinju, and they share a secret desire to somehow facilitate the return of a powerful being named Atomsk.
Meanwhile, weird things are going on in Hidomi's hometown, particularly a giant flat iron that's parked on the edge of town which will eventually be put into motion by a giant hand from above, mowing down and flattening everything in its path.
This all has to do with a struggle between two forces known as Medical Mechanica and Fraternity, agents of which are at work trying to either cause or prevent various disasters from occurring.
But for all its sci-fi sound and fury, the likable teenage characters are what give FLCL its heart and maintain our interest. Even as the story charges irrevocably toward its catastrophic finale, the emphasis is as much on Hidomi, Ide, and their friends, whose interpersonal relationships we follow even as they begin to play key roles in the impending battle, as on the freaky warrior chick Haruko and other combatants.
FLCL: ALTERNATIVE continues with the return of Haruko, still on her no-holds-barred quest for whatever (it ultimately doesn't really matter), and a timid, insecure young girl named Kana who continually seeks acceptance from her close circle of female friends, each of whom has her own problems.
But even as Haruko somehow stumbles into the role of mentor for this young girl, she also uses her potential mind powers to kick-start Armageddon all over again, this time on a level more cataclysmic than before.
If all this sounds complicated, it's because it is. In fact, I pretty much gave up trying to keep up with all the different plotlines and such, and just started holding on for dear life as this dizzying succession of eye-candy animation and swirling, surreal imagery went rushing by like a river of watercolors.
Most impressive are the intricate, exquisitely-rendered artwork and full animation, which looks just like traditional cel animation but with digital enhancements. Character design is semi-realistic for the most part but full of cartoony manga-like silliness and exaggerated reactions, all of which adds to the fun.
As for the battle sequences, the artists and animators let their imaginations run wild with some of the most surreal and dazzling imagery you're likely to see in a series of this kind. The combination of such startling visuals with the sometimes childlike, sometimes mature story themes remains compelling throughout.
Both seasons offer satisfying final episodes, yet FLCL: PROGRESSIVE & ALTERNATIVE COMBO PACK ultimately leaves the door open for more adventures of guitar-slinging wild girl Haruko and another hapless group of youthful protagonists enduring the vagaries of adolescence while caught in a colorful clash of powerful opposing forces.
BLU-RAY COMBO PACK SPECIAL FEATURES The Making of FLCL: Progressive & Alternative: An in depth look behind the scenes featuring interviews with the cast and crew. Meet the Creators The Pillows English Voice Actors Production: Behind-the-Scenes
FLCL: ALTERNATIVE DVD SPECIAL FEATURES English Voice Actors Production: Behind-the-Scenes
COMBO PACK INCLUDES ALL 12 EPISODES RE: Start Freebie Honey Stone Skipping LooPQR Fool On the Planet Our Running Flying Memory Grown-Up Wannabe Freestyle Collection Pit-a-Pat Shake it Off Full Flat
DIGITAL FLCL: Progressive & Alternative Combo Pack is available to own on Digital. Digital purchase allows consumers to instantly stream and download all episodes to watch anywhere and anytime on their favorite devices. Digital movies and TV shows are available from various digital retailers including Amazon Video, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and others. A Digital Copy is also included with the purchase of specially marked Blu-ray discs for redemption and cloud storage.
BASICS Blu-ray/DVD Release Dates: February 4, 2020 Blu-ray and DVD Presented in 16x9 widescreen format
BLU-RAY COMBO PACK Price: $44.98 SRP ($52.99 in Canada) Running Time: Feature: Approx. 264 min Enhanced Content: Approx. 35 min 2 BD 50s Audio – English (5.1) Subtitles – English UPC# 883929707584 Catalog#1000757643
FLCL: ALTERNATIVE DVD Price: $19.99 SRP ($24.99 in Canada) Running Time: Feature: Approx. 132 min Enhanced Content: Approx. 10 min 2 DVD-9s Audio – English (5.1) Subtitles – English UPC# 883929707577 Catalog# 1000757642
Remember that cool low-budget monster flick where the giant stop-motion-animated crab terrorized a small town? No, I'm not talking about one of the great black-and-white 50s classics, but 2015's QUEEN CRAB, which came as a welcome CGI-free throwback to the old days when filmmakers with limited resources were trying to make Ray Harryhausen movies.
Now, the same team behind that bundle of old-school fun is at it again, this time going the pulp sci-fi route with their alien invasion thriller OUTPOST EARTH (2016).
Human civilization gets destroyed during the opening titles in a scaled-down riff on INDEPENDENCE DAY by way of EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, leaving a devasted dystopian world whose few human survivors are being hunted down by hostile aliens and their mutant mongrel pets.
Erin Waterhouse plays Kay, a bow-hunting babe with supermodel looks who encounters brash, wisecracking anti-hero Blake (Titus Himmelberger) while wandering the wasteland "hunting wabbits" and avoiding other hungry humans out for food.
After Blake saves her from some "goons" (slang for aliens) Kay invites him back to her hideout which she shares with naive sister Penny (Kristen Gylling), dour den-mother Kagen (Yolie Canales, QUEEN CRAB), and brilliant theoretical physicist Uncle Zayden (Mason Carver), a white-bearded egghead who's always in his makeshift lab trying to figure out what makes the aliens tick.
It takes Blake a while to gain the trust of the others, especially the skeptical Kagen. But when Penny gets captured by a group of bad humans (including QUEEN CRAB's Ken Van Sant as the loathsome eye-patched Manny) he comes through during a daring rescue and then later discovers the secret to operating one of the crashed alien spacecraft (part of which involves getting really drunk).
OUTPOST EARTH plays a bit like a small-scale DAY OF THE DEAD (Uncle Zayden reminds me of that film's giddy scientist, Dr. Logan) and 50s classic THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED, both featuring the remnants of humanity battling outside forces from their secluded hideout. There's also a hint of the flash-forward scenes in THE TERMINATOR albeit much less populated.
Locations are well-chosen for their desolate, bombed-out look, bringing to mind the final segment of "Threads." Performances and dialogue are good and the characters are likable, particularly the two leads whom we just know will eventually form a twosome and help repopulate the Earth.
But that's for later--in the meantime, it's interesting how writer-director Brett Piper (QUEEN CRAB, TRICLOPS, A NYMPHOID BARBARIAN IN DINOSAUR HELL) takes what is basically a James Cameron-level scenario and drastically scales it down while still coming up with something that's fun to watch.
Much of the fun, in fact, comes from seeing how he solves various SPFX challenges without simply being able to throw money at them. This includes not only humanoid aliens in nifty masks and full-body suits, but a delightful array of stop-motion creatures, some of which do battle in the time-honored monster movie tradition.
These SPFX remind one of such films as EQUINOX, THE CRATER LAKE MONSTER, and THE EVIL DEAD, along with the stop-motion creatures on the 70s Saturday morning series "Jason of Star Command."
One humanoid mutant, who may or may not have once been human (he's played by Steve Diasparra in full body-suit before morphing into a towering animated behemoth), even resembles something out of those old Jack Kirby monster comics as well as KING KONG animator Willis O'Brien's sketches for his proposed KING KONG VS. FRANKENSTEIN.
The film ends with a wild sequence involving Blake getting good and loaded (for the cause, of course), hopping into that crashed spacecraft with Kay, and making a daring attack run (aka "drunken joyride") on an alien outpost thought to be one of their main command centers. The ending is left wide open for a sequel.
Despite the miniscule budget, OUTPOST EARTH is loaded with entertainment value--especially for us nostalgic Monster Kids--and intriguing elements of both serious and pulp sci-fi. It's the kind of flick I used to run home from school to watch on the afternoon movie.
Space movies in the 1950s-60s speculated on what futuristic space travel would be like.
One of the most common features of these movies was the ever-popular "G-Force Grimace."
As a kid I could never figure out why they all made those weird girning faces during take-off.
ROCKETSHIP XM (1950) DESTINATION MOON (1950) PROJECT MOONBASE (1953) CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953) CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955) MISSILE TO THE MOON (1958) 12 TO THE MOON (1960)
I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!
Actor George Zucco, as "The Ape Man", received third billing after Bela Lugosi and John Carradine.
But a sudden illness (or, perhaps, second thoughts) made him drop out before a single scene was completed.
It begins with two brief shots of Zucco on the table.
Then Zucco is replaced mid-scene by actor Frank Moran.
Read our review of the filmHERE. I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!
Ken Curtis produced both this and "The Giant Gila Monster" in 1959.
Both were filmed outside of Dallas, TX.
A frequent John Wayne co-star, Curtis would gain fame as Festus in "Gunsmoke."
Director Ray Kellogg would co-direct "The Green Berets" with John Wayne.
James Best would find TV fame in "The Dukes Of Hazzard."
Ingrid Goude was Miss Sweden of 1956.
Baruch Lamet was the father of director Sidney Lumet.
The "killer shrews" were actually dogs wearing long hair and fangs.
(Originally posted 3/27/17. Information about public showings no longer applies.)
DONNIE DARKO (2001) is kind of like an ultra "Twilight Zone" episode by way of "The X-Files" as filtered through the mind of David Lynch and decorated by Tim Burton. With some Robert A. Heinlein, Clive Barker, and John Irving thrown into the mix as well. (The director has called it “The Catcher in the Rye as told by Philip K. Dick.")
And yet it's also its own unique, one-of-a-kind sort of funhouse mirror with all the giddy fear and dark exhilaration of a malfunctioning spook house ride.
Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ZODIAC) gains our sympathy right away because he's a nice teenaged kid with a nice family, and he'd like to be a normal guy, but he isn't--I mean, really, really isn't--and he can't help it.
His befuddled psychiatrist (Katherine Ross) tells his parents he's schizophrenic. Sometimes he skips his meds. He knows he's "crazy", and that his attempts not to be are probably doomed.
So, occasionally, he just goes with the flow and sets the fires and vandalizes the things that the tall guy in the scary-looking bunny costume and mask tells him to do.
Why? Because the scary bunny, who goes by the name of Frank, is a time traveler, helping Donnie to fulfill his destiny and maintain the space-time continuum by influencing the lives of everyone around him in very fundamental ways before the world ends, which will occur at the end of the month on Halloween night.
The incredible event that sets all of this into motion occurs early in the film, after we've met Donnie and the other Darkos and things have settled down for the night, and suddenly, there's a tremendous crash that shakes the house like an earthquake.
That's the detached jet airplane engine demolishing Donnie's bedroom from above, mere minutes after he's been awakened and summoned safely out of the house by Frank.
For me, this weird and wonderful event is the sort of thing that just makes me fall in love with a movie right off the bat and stay with it every step of the way if it continues to be that wonderful, which DONNIE DARKO does the way a mindbending page-turner of a novel or comic book does.
Mary McDonnell (DANCES WITH WOLVES, INDEPENDENCE DAY, SCREAM 4, "Battlestar Galactica") and Holmes Osborne (THAT THING THAT YOU DO!, BRING IT ON, AFFLICTION) are ideal as Donnie's long-suffering but loving parents Rose and Eddie, and Gyllenhaal's real-life sister Maggie (THE DARK KNIGHT) is his sister Elizabeth. Their younger sister Samantha is played cutely by Daveigh Chase (AMERICAN ROMANCE, SPIRITED AWAY).
Executive producer Drew Barrymore makes a strong impression as Donnie's progressive, perceptive English teacher, Miss Pomeroy, whose methods will be called into question by stiff-assed fellow teacher Miss Farmer (Beth Grant, OPERATION: ENDGAME, SPEED), an emotionally backward harpy whose classes seem to consist solely of videotapes by New Age self-help guru Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze, ROADHOUSE, DIRTY DANCING, GHOST).
Other supporting players in this very interesting cast include Noah Wyle, Seth Rogan, James Duval (AMERICAN ROMANCE, THE BLACK WATERS OF ECHO'S POND, INDEPENDENCE DAY), and Patience Cleveland (PSYCHO III) as Roberta Sparrow, aka "Grandma Death", a crazy old recluse who, it turns out, may know a thing or two about time travel herself.
High school life is a daily parade of the usual nerdy friends and scary bullies, as well as a pretty but troubled new student (Jena Malone as "Gretchen") who catches the eye of lonely but attractively enigmatic Donnie.
I tried the lonely but attractively enigmatic thing in high school but it never worked for me. It does, however, work for Donnie as he and Gretchen form a sympatico relationship that will become crucial in the scheme of things as time counts irrevocably down to Frank's mysterious end-of-world deadline.
As Donnie, Jake Gyllenhaal maintains just the right attitude throughout--bemused, puzzled, sad, resentful, fearful, and yet deeply intrigued by what's happening to him, because who knows? It just might be real.
Visually, DONNIE DARKO is an eye-pleasing, idealized evocation of everyday life, sort of an updated Kodachrome version of Capra's small town in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE or the deceptive veneer of normalcy in Lynch's BLUE VELVET, all shot through with a warm nostalgia for the 80s. (Donnie takes Gretchen to see THE EVIL DEAD at the neighborhood bijou, while familiar 80s songs enhance the soundtrack.)
Richard Kelly directs the whole thing with the skill of a craftsman and the sensibility of an artist who likes to turn everyday things inside out and explore the beauty and mystery within, occasionally uncovering the ugly side of things as well.
He also imbues the film with a sense of dark, magical fun that makes the serious aspects and underlying humanity of the story resonate even more.
This is exemplified by the loving but impishly humorous interactions between Donnie's parents, who sometimes act like a couple of kids, and between Donnie and his sisters. It's nice to see a functioning family unit in a movie these days, even though this family does have one huge dysfunction, which is Donnie.
It's been a while since I was this totally caught up in a film and entranced by it until the very last frame. DONNIE DARKO is like a big, juicy Tootsie Pop made of mystery and imagination, and you savor the act of seeing how many licks it takes to get to the chewy cult movie center.
Donnie Darko: English / USA / 113 min (theatrical) / 134 min (Director's Cut) Here's our original coverage of the upcoming re-release:
Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko Returns to Theaters Arrow Films Debuts 4K Restoration of Theatrical & Director's Cuts
Weeklong Runs in Los Angeles, New York and More
"Excitingly original indie vision" - Entertainment Weekly "A mini-masterpiece" - Empire
Los Angeles, CA - Arrow Films has announced the March 31st domestic theatrical debut of the 4K restoration of Richard Kelly's cult hit Donnie Darko. Following a wildly successful re-release in the UK for its fifteenth anniversary, the film will return to theaters in cities across the United States. Fifteen years before "Stranger Things" combined science-fiction, Spielberg-ian touches and 80s nostalgia to much acclaim, Kelly set the template and the benchmark with his debut feature, Donnie Darko. Initially beset with distribution problems, it would slowly find its audience and emerge as arguably the first cult classic of the new millennium. The 4K restoration of Donnie Darko will premiere at the Vista in Los Angeles on March 30th, and officially open in Los Angeles at the Cinefamily and in New York at Metrograph on March 31st.
Described by director Richard Kelly as "The Catcher in the Rye as told by Philip K. Dick", Donnie Darko combines an eye-catching, eclectic cast: pre-stardom Jake (Nightcrawler, Brokeback Mountain, Nocturnal Animals) and Maggie Gyllenhaal ("The Honourable Woman", The Dark Knight), Jena Malone (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Neon Demon), the late heartthrob Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing, Ghost), Drew Barrymore (E.T., "Grey Gardens", "Santa Clarita Diet") Oscar nominees Mary McDonnell (Dances With Wolves, Passion Fish, "Battlestar Galactica") and Katharine Ross (The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives), and television favorite Noah Wyle ("ER", "Falling Skies") and an evocative soundtrack of 80s classics by Echo and the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears and Duran Duran.
The brand-new 4K restoration was produced by Arrow Films from the original camera negatives and supervised and approved by Kelly and cinematographer Steven Poster. The 4K restoration premiered to a packed audience at the National Film Theatre in London on December 17th, 2016, with an introduction by Richard Kelly. A screening of the Director's Cut followed the next day. The re-release opened nationwide in the UK on December 23rd, eventually grossing £70,000.
Both the theatrical cut and the director's cut are being made available to venues via a partnership with Cartilage Films, and locations will vary.
Donnie Darko will also return for weeklong runs in Denver, Columbus, Cleveland, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Tempe, Tulsa and San Francisco on March 31st, and in El Paso, Portland and Detroit on April 7.
Special screenings include Jacksonville, Austin, Dallas, Honolulu, Lubbock, Baton Rouge, Sioux Falls, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Durham and Stamford throughout March and April. A full list of screenings is available at Cartilage Films.
http://www.cartilagefilms.com/donnie-darko.html?utm_source=Copy+of+Donnie+Darko+Theaters&utm_campaign=Outfest&utm_medium=email
March 31st Theatrical Release:
The Cinefamily
611 N Fairfax Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St
New York, NY 10002
Donnie is a troubled high school student: in therapy, prone to sleepwalking and in possession of an imaginary friend, a six-foot rabbit named Frank, who tells him the world is going to end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. During that time he will navigate teenage life, narrowly avoid death in the form of a falling jet engine, follow Frank's maladjusted instructions and try to maintain the space-time continuum.
I've been a bad movie lover for so long, I can sit back and enjoy movies like FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965) just as much as I would CITIZEN KANE or THE SOUND OF MUSIC, whereas your average normal person might find both their gag reflex and their flight instinct activated by the very sight of it.
I pity such people their inability to watch stuff like this with the same giddy delight I felt as I ordered the DVD from Amazon, knowing that when it arrived, I would be able to immerse myself in low budget, ineptly made, but wonderfully entertaining sci-fi goodness about aliens from Mars who have come to Earth to kidnap women as breeding stock to help repopulate their atomic war-ravaged planet.
As if that weren't enough, NASA scientist Dr. Adam Steele (venerable actor James "Jim" Karen in an early role) and his co-worker Karen (Nancy Marshall) have just made space travel safer for humans by creating an android astronaut, whom they've named "Colonel Frank Saunders" (Robert Reilly).
Right after Frank is launched into space, the Martians shoot his rocket down, leaving the horribly disfigured humanoid robot roaming the countryside killing people a la "Frankenstein."
Not only am I not making any of that stuff up, but it's even nuttier than it sounds. The head Martians are played by former Playboy Playmate and Three Stooges co-star Marilyn Hanold (as "Princess Marcuzan") and familiar face Lou Cutell (LITTLE BIG MAN, PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE) as her second-in-command Dr. Nadir, a bald, white-skinned alien with pointed ears and a high camp sense of humor that kicks in whenever he's ordered to blow something up or shoot it down.
Their bargain-basement spaceship is also populated by a gaggle of henchmen whose spacesuits, confusingly, make them look like Earth astronauts. There's also a tall, brawny alien played by the great Bruce Glover (CHINATOWN, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, WALKING TALL), recognizable even under heavy makeup in his second movie role. He also plays the fearsome space monster of the title, who will indeed meet "Frankenstein" during the film's furious climax.
The story begins in Florida, where, at a press conference, we're treated to the sight of Frank rather comically going freeze-frame during a press conference and having to be hustled back to the lab for repairs by Adam and Karen.
Then we're whisked off to Puerto Rico after Frank's disfiguring crash, allowing the director to shoot a lengthy montage of the two scientists riding a dinky motor scooter along scenic motorways and beachfronts to the film's sappy and rather incongruous love theme, "To Have And To Hold" by The Distant Cousins.
While the two young lovers search for their runaway robo-astronaut, the Martians terrorize the countryside kidnapping bikini-clad women from beaches and pool parties, disintegrating any men who get in their way with sunlight-reflecting ray guns like the ones used in TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.
Also like that film, this one is surprisingly well-edited, with a gradually quickening pace that leads to a fast-moving, exciting finale that sees the Martians attacked by our air force and Frank, his rational mind now restored, going mano-a-mano with that really cool space monster.
Just as Johnny Depp claims in ED WOOD that he could construct a whole movie out of stock footage, this one goes a long way toward doing just that by using tons of the stuff for any scenes involving either the military or NASA spacecraft (including much footage from Mercury launches and orbital photography). The final five frenetic minutes or so are evidence that the film's editor was having a ball putting this thing together, and it's infectious.
Granted, the shamelessly warped FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER would fit comfortably onto any list of the worst films ever made, but that doesn't keep it from being just as much fun as a lot of "good" movies that I could name. Maybe even more fun if, like me, you're just a tiny bit warped too.
