Monthly Archives: June 2012

Francis Coppola’s idealistic attempt to transform the way movies were made upended his career when it crashed and burned, taking his Zoetrope studio with it. Set in Las Vegas but filmed entirely on sound stages to heighten the artificiality, it featured a number of audacious stylistic touches, but despite them (or perhaps because of them), audiences found the end result pretentious and uninvolving. Even so, its adherents see it as a brave, innovative film with a great soundtrack.

This was Matt Dillon’s third featured role in a film based on an S.E. Hinton novel, shot back-to-back by Francis Coppola immediately after finishing The Outsiders, which shares much the same cast and crew. What was viewed as its self-indulgent art-house aura turned off audiences and critics, but modern viewers have begun to warm up to this expressionistic and bracingly experimental effort, which was characterized at the time by Time critic Richard Corliss as “Coppola’s professional suicide note to the industry”.

Sandwiched in between his two Godfather triumphs, Francis Coppola’s tense thriller is a quietly malevolent masterpiece. Gene Hackman plays his reputedly favorite role as an obsessive surveillance expert whose recordings of a possible murder put him in jeopardy.  Partially inspired by Antonioni’s Blow Up, this is the kind of grown-up movie they just don’t make anymore–remarkable in its time and still impressive today despite the intervening leaps in technology.

John Badham recalls the making of his rip-roaring action picture featuring some of the craziest urban helicopter action yet seen onscreen, as overseen by veteran pilot and aerial coordinator James C. Gavin. Malcolm McDowell, playing the villain, conquered his longstanding fear of flying long enough to go aloft for the loopy attack helicopter sequences. His obvious discomfort goes beyond the level of performance into the realm of Real Trouper-ism.

Martha Coolidge’s directorial debut introduced the local phenomenon of ValleySpeak to an unbelieving world. An early exemplar of the let-the-song-score tell the story, it features a panoply of period bands, but not all those listed in the credits can actually be heard in the film today. Due to music rights problems, songs by The Clash, Culture Club, Banararama and The Jam had to be dropped after the trailer was in circulation.

Former Chicago ad man John Hughes parlayed several print and script assignments for the National Lampoon into a writer/director gig on this, the first of a veritable onslaught of teen angst comedies that gave the world The Brat Pack, a group of young actors who went on to careers of varied length after hitting it big in Hughes movies. This one was written for 15 year-old Molly Ringwald, whose headshot Hughes pulled out of a pile of submissions. It hung over his typewriter as he banged out the script.

Prolific Filipino exploitation king Eddie Romero takes a break from his Blood Island and girls-in-chains movies to try his hand at a pseudo-family oriented aquatic fantasy. It’s still squarely aimed at the drive-in trade, but it’s much less raunchy than the usual tropical action dualler. Makes a nice double bill with Romero’s similar Twilight People, made earlier the same year, also for Corman competitor Dimension Pictures.

Jack Hill gives us the lowdown on the tsuris behind his spoofy low budget fantasy epic (credited onscreen to “Brian Stuart”), a paradigm of the kind of movies VHS was made for. Okay, there are no sorceresses to be seen, but we do get a pair of hot medieval barbarian twins, daughters of an evil warlord, who get into violent trouble and doff their duds in time-honored New World Pictures tradition.

NSFW.

This is the way it wasn’t!  A longtime favorite with Creationists, this loose remake of the 1940 cavemen-vs.dinosaurs epic made a star of unknown Raquel Welch despite the fact she has almost no dialog. Its success, which led to several further prehistoric adventures from Hammer, was eclipsed by the phenomenal reaction to a single iconic publicity still of the star in her fur bikini, which became a wildly popular poster and cultural touchstone. Ray Harryhausen, who supplied the mostly stop-motion monsters, made only four more films before retiring. The US release was cut by 9 minutes, since restored.