DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1919) -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/12/21

 

Currently rewatching: My favorite Mary Pickford movie and one of my favorite silent films ever, DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1919), which I haven't seen since it was on PBS back in the 80s.

Mary is radiant and utterly disarming in this classic film that's filled with laughs and pathos.

As usual, Mary's fascinating facial expressions and physical acting are a delight and her slight stature enables her to play the plucky orphan character from pre-teen to young woman. 

 

The story maintains a light tone most of the time despite some dark elements, such as Mary's character, Jerusha Abbott, being abandoned in a trash can as an infant and winding up in an orphange run by a cruel woman and her spiteful toady.

"Judy", as the children call her, is a rambunctious rebel and full of mischief, which Mary Pickford plays to the hilt. 

We see her in lots of frantic action of this nature (the sequence in which she and a younger boy inadvertently get drunk is particularly funny) until the years pass and Judy, now a young woman, is sponsored by a mysterious benefactor--whom she knows only as "Daddy-Long-Legs"--and sent to college.

 

Mary handles the transition between pre-teen and young lady flawlessly, as two different upper-class boys vie for her affection while her benefactor, "John Smith", remains in the background.

In addition to struggling with romantic matters, she also must deal with the prejudice her classmates and acquaintances have for her "common" status. 

While much of the story leans toward sentiment, it never becomes maudlin or descends into bathos even when Judy serves as a surrogate mother for a terminally-ill orphan.

 

 
All of the story elements are deftly interwoven and augmented by cleverly-written and rather witty intertitles and art. Direction, cinematography, and performances are uniformly fine.

I got a used copy of this rare DVD which, thank goodness, is in very good condition and features a great print of the film.

It even has a good musical score that was written for it and performed by a chamber orchestra.

This title along with TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY and SPARROWS are my favorite Mary Pickford films. DADDY-LONG-LEGS in particular is one of the most delightfully entertaining silent films I've ever seen.

DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1919) -- Movie Review by Porfle

THE LAST HOUSE -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/23/15

Described as a "psycho-sexual thriller", THE LAST HOUSE, a.k.a. "Breath of Hate" (2015) wants to be deep and maybe even a little avant-garde--in addition to being violent and perversely sexy--but doesn't quite have the finesse to pull it off.

CLERKS' Jason Mewes (ZOMBIE HAMLET, SILENT BUT DEADLY) is Ned, a lovesick schlub trying to convince his hooker heartthrob Love (Lauren Walsh, MEET THE SPARTANS) to quit the business and be his one-guy gal.  But when Love finally goes to her pimp to serve notice, Sonny (Jack Forcinito, SILENT NIGHT, ZOMBIE NIGHT) strongly insists that she go on one final job with two other hookers to a swanky mansion where a wild sex party is to be held.  Reluctantly, Love agrees.

Bad idea, since we've already seen the three psychotic squatters occupying the mansion do away with a lady realtor (SLEEPAWAY CAMP's Felissa Rose in a brief, thankless cameo), and it's obvious their idea of "party" will prove unpleasant for the three unsuspecting working girls.

There's Cleb (Ricardo Gray), an excitable young black dude whose "crazy happy" mood, we're told, must be seen to be believed; Selma (Monique Parent, THE PERFECT HOUSE), a wickedly dominant sex bomb; and "Hate" (Ezra Buzzington), the oily, enigmatic, and endlessly verbose ringleader of the tawdry trio.  Once this dubious situation gets into full swing, THE LAST HOUSE becomes a round-robin series of sexual trainwrecks. 

Cleb, we discover, likes cheerleaders.  In fact, he thinks they look good enough to eat--literally.  He's also partial to heating up half a canteloupe in the microwave and then making love to it AMERICAN PIE-style, and when these two scenarios are edited together the confusion is compounded when Love suddenly shows up and starts hacking away at him with a butcher knife.  Or does she?

Meanwhile, some of the film's kinkier deeds are performed in the upstairs bedroom when Selma has her way with the other hooker in a mistress-slave scenario that includes spanking, toe-sucking, and other sleazy sex stuff that skirts the boundaries of "softcore" before turning baseball-bat violent and, for me anyway, baffling.

But the most perplexing part comes when we watch our heroine Love in an increasingly troublesome tryst with "Hate", which starts out creepy and just gets worse, until he starts to live up to his name and she finds herself in grave peril. 

Which sounds straightforward enough, but is anything but because this film, remember, wants to be some kind of sleazy art film with its jumbled timelines and rambling monologues. 

Despite his on-the-nose moniker, Hate reminds me mainly of an evil David Spade--not very menacing, even when his true nature starts to bleed through.  The story gets progressively strange as characters die, live again, kill, get killed, etc. and we see a variety of flashbacks, flash-forwards, dreams that foretell the future, alternate outcomes, and other timeline-fiddling. While all this is going on, Ned is busy trying to track down Love by haunting the strip club where she works and going head to head with Sonny.

Jason Mewes handles his role well enough but it's Lauren Walsh as Love who's the real standout here.  Monique Parent is meant to be wickedly sexy, which is something she could do without breaking a sweat.  As Hate, Ezra Buzzington gets an "A" for effort although I never found the character as intriguing or mysterious as intended.  Jack Forcinito is sleaze personified as the pimp Sonny, whose main concern is his miniature pet turtle. 

The DVD from WildEye Releasing is widescreen with Dolby Digital sound.  No subtitles.  Bonus features consist of a writer and director commentary, deleted scenes, a Cinemayhem Film Festival director interview, and the film's London premiere at the Gorezone Film Festival.

While some members of the cast double as prolific porn stars, THE LAST HOUSE is more thriller and less sleaze than the synopsis might lead you to believe. I didn't find it all that thrilling, either, but I must give the filmmakers credit for trying something different. 

THE LAST HOUSE -- DVD Review by Porfle

The Deer Hunter (1978): "This Is This" (video)

 

This is this! This is this! This is this this this!

Video by Porfle Popnecker. I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

The Deer Hunter (1978): "This Is This" (video)

JACK BROWN GENIUS -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted in 2009

Do you miss the good old days when Yahoo Serious was a cinematic force to be reckoned with? Then you may enjoy JACK BROWN, GENIUS, a 1994 comedy from New Zealand, because it plays as though producer Peter Jackson, director Tony Hiles, and co-writer Fran Walsh had him in mind for the title role when they penned the script for Wingnut Films.

The farcical nature of the story emerges during the prologue, with a 10th century English monk named Elmer (Stuart Devenie) jumping off a cliff to test his newly-invented wings only to fall to his death and be wrongly banished to Purgatory for committing "suicide." Nearly 1000 years later, but only days before Elmer is to be consigned to Hell for all time, he enters the brain of a struggling inventor named Jack Brown (Timothy Balme, BRAINDEAD) and nags him into trying to succeed where he failed, thus convincing God that Elmer didn't really intend to commit suicide after all. (Wait--isn't God supposed to be omniscient? Oh, never mind.)

I've seen "Scooby-Doo" episodes that made more sense, but this movie just blithely sails along as though the story weren't completely out to lunch. Like a weird medieval variation of INNERSPACE (with a dash of HUDSON HAWK thrown in, God help us), we see Elmer bopping around inside Jack's brain and poking at his nerves and blood vessels to get attention whenever Jack starts to work on his current project (hydraulic leaping shoes) for his demanding boss (Edward Campbell). "Thou canst not silence me, Jack! Thy brainpan is my permanent place of abode!" Elmer insists.

After spending some time in a "Regional Centre for the Deeply Disturbed", Jack actually does invent a working pair of wings, only to have the power source stolen by The Boss and his evil dominatrix girlfriend, Sylvia (Lisa Chappell), to sell to an Asian businessman. Meanwhile, Jack's best friend Dennis (Marton Csokas, LORD OF THE RINGS, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY), who runs a mobile hot dog stand, is seduced into helping Sylvia while his bride-to-be Eileen (Nicola Murphy) starts to fall for Jack, whom she thinks is crazy. Okay, where did I lose you?

JACK BROWN GENIUS features some nicely garish set design and is directed like a cartoon, full of hyperkinetic action and ridiculous plot developments that just barrel along like a circus wagon with no brakes. Some potentially funny situations are set up and then just sailed through without any elaboration--this movie could've been twice as funny if the writers had just taken the time to insert some comedy into the comedy scenes. This is especially true during Jack's stay in the nuthouse, although the part where he tries to silence Elmer by subjecting himself to shock treatment is nicely done.

Then again, the movie sometimes manages to pull off some almost dazzling sequences out of the blue. Angry with Jack for messing up their leaping-shoes deal with the Asians, The Boss takes after him in a car with the intent of running him down. This leads to some incredible stunt/effects scenes involving a car and two speeding trains as Jack leaps for his life. Another chase in a garbage dump has Jack and Eileen being pursued by a livid Sylvia in a demolition-derby style smash-up with an exhilarating finale. And the climactic flying effects are well-done.

I enjoyed some of the dialogue, such as this simple exchange:

JACK: "There's a monk in my head, Eileen."
EILEEN: "Pardon?"

Timothy Balme is appropriately cartoonlike in the title role, a perplexed wacky-inventor type who depends on his imagination to get him out of a scrape. Nicola Murphy is likable in her debut as Eileen, although her sudden infatuation with Jack, who throws up on her shoes and seems insane enough for her to have him committed to an asylum, seems a bit of a stretch. As The Boss, Edward Campbell has a gruff Vinnie Jones-like thing going. Marton Csokas, who would go on to have quite a successful career, does what he can with the role of Dennis, which is just all over the map.

Likewise, Stuart Devenie makes the best of his wacky monk character, Elmer, which consists mainly of being irritating and bouncing around inside a big rubber brain. My favorite supporting character has to be Lisa Chappell as bad girl Sylvia, for reasons which I will leave to your conjecture. She has the one graphic gore scene in the film, but, unfortunately, neither of the two bare behinds on display belong to her. (You don't wanna know who they do belong to.)

I watched a barebones screener so I can only say that the final DVD extras should include a stills gallery. The 16 x 9 anamorphic widescreen image and 2.0 Dolby Digital audio are good. The film has a nice pop music score and I especially liked the song "Not an Ordinary Life" by the Brainchilds.

JACK BROWN GENIUS gets by on a certain amount of inventiveness, some appealing actors, and lots of energy--which adds up to a decent amount of fun. It isn't one of the best comedies ever made, but it's one of the best comedies that Yahoo Serious never made.

JACK BROWN GENIUS -- Movie Review by Porfle

Coopers' Christmas (2008): "I Kill Poppy!" (video)

 

This scene from the 2008 comedy "Coopers' Christmas" teaches a valuable lesson: if you're Poppy, you should never let your guard down around Dougie.

(Caution: something violent happens)

Video by Porfle Popnecker. I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

Coopers' Christmas (2008): "I Kill Poppy!" (video)