Bad Cinema for a Happy New Year

By Steve Evans 

It’s something of a tradition for me to start off the first week of the New Year by watching a bad movie. Bad, as in incompetent. Poorly produced. Ineptly acted. Lousy direction. Ridiculous special effects. The idea is my film watching can only improve as the year progresses. Not really. I just have a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to really dreadful flicks.

So today we’re gonna spin I Eat Your Skin (1964), a longtime fav in the disreputable genre of Le Bad Cinema. As is my nature, I must first share some backstory about this motion picture.

It was made as Voodoo Blood Bath and sat unreleased for seven years until an exhibitor, the aptly named Jerry Gross, bought the picture for pennies on the dollar to use as a double feature with his movie I Drink Your Blood. To enhance the alliterative exploitation effect, Voodoo Blood Bath was retitled I Eat Your Skin.

No skin is actually eaten.

Our story: A sexist-pig novelist, his publicist and a shrill woman with a powerful thirst for cocktails decide to visit a mysterious island for research on a new book. The island is home to a sketchy scientist, his smoking-hot daughter and assorted natives who practice voodoo rituals. Eventually zombies show up with makeup that resembles fried eggs for eyes. I am not making this up. On-screen talent includes nobody you ever heard of, which in a strange way makes the story more involving since there are zero celebrity distractions.

The movie opens at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach – the same hotel used in early scenes for the James Bond adventure Goldfinger, also made that year. There all similarities end, as I Eat Your Skin flies off the rails almost immediately. It is wildly entertaining and will leave you incredulous. A full 80 minutes and 47 seconds of WTF?

Directed by the incomparable Del Tenney, who was a busy man in the early 1960s. The same year he wrapped up I Eat Your Skin, Tenney also managed to complete The Horror of Party Beach, which is likewise essential viewing if you enjoy movies about bikers, beach babes in bikinis, surf rock and rubbery bug-eyed monsters with bratwursts for teeth.

As a public service, a full and uncut copy of I Eat Your Skin is available below. Learn to see the worst films; they are often sublime.


Cinema Uprising Copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

At 2 1/2 Hours 'Infinity War' Earns Its Title

By Steve Evans

I’ve long since outlived the core demographic for superhero films, yet when I find out such-and-such a movie is one of the most expensive ever made, I’m drawn to it like moth to flame. So I squandered more than 2 ½ hours of life watching Avengers Infinity War on Netflix. This is a movie that cost almost $400 million to make and has so far recouped more than $2 billion – with a B – worldwide. Big Business, this. So I wanted to see what $400 million looks like burning up on a screen. My screen, as it turns out, since I had no desire to drop $15 on a theater ticket when the flick came out last April. Sitting in a packed auditorium with 13-year-old boys chattering like monkeys is not my idea of fun. So what does $400 million look like on fire?

It looks like a lot of computer-generated imagery supplemented by noise, more characters with speaking parts and convoluted backstories than I care to count, planets where anyone can breathe without oxygen tank assistance and phenomenally powerful, mystical devices with names I am ill-prepared to pronounce.

No way I could summarize the plot here, beyond the observation that the antagonist looks like an oak tree covered in shit and he wants magic stones to fit in his metal glove (or "gauntlet," if you want to be particular about it) so he can obliterate half the life in the universe by snapping his fingers, which makes him marginally worse than Hitler. Or possibly Trump. When his glove is fully tricked out, this tuff guy looks like he's been accessorizing at boutiques favored by George Michael. The villain’s name is Thanos, which I do know is derived from the Greek word for “immortality,” suggesting he’ll be a tough bastard to beat when the next installment of this franchise opens in April 2019. Marvel excels at cliffhangers; keep 'em coming back for more.

You can read this film as an anti-capitalist screed, as some have, though that seems ludicrous given the amount of money these Marvel films make. You can read the film as a dire warning on totalitarianism, though I’m skeptical the world really needs such another warning, given the prevalence of mad would-be tyrants running amok these days.

Was I entertained? Marginally. I have a kickin’ surround sound system and it got quite a workout from all the booms and bangs. For my own troubles, I got a three-Aleve headache and a bunch of questions I suspect can only be answered if I watch earlier Marvel films and get caught up on who’s who and what’s what, which I am not wont to do. I also wonder how much good could be done in the world with $400 million, rather than give Robert Downey Jr. profit participation so he’ll have money to go buy another bong.

At 2 hours and nearly 40 minutes, calling the film Infinity War almost seems like truth in advertising.

Behold the churlishness of a middle-aged man, a film snob whose preferences run to black & white foreign films with beautiful women and subtitles. I should have known better.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

No Rush, Thanks

By Steve Evans

I love rock documentaries. Any chance I get to learn context and meaning behind the music, I jump on it. Sometimes I get lucky and encounter an unintentional comedy disguised as a rock doc, leaving me sputtering with laughter. Rob Reiner’s great mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984) relentlessly skewered rock and roll pomposity and stupidity, of which there remains no shortage.

Sometimes, though, you don’t need a work of satire to help high-minded musicians look foolish. Often, they don’t need any help.

This set the scene for my viewing of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, a film about the Canadian power trio’s 40-odd year career. The picture came out eight years ago, though I had successfully dodged it until last night when, in a fit of tedium, I cracked into a six-pack of particularly good beer and cued up that Rush doc. Eons ago, when I was in high school, Rush was an anomaly. If you listened to them at all, it was just to tide you over in-between Zeppelin albums. From the first time I heard the band, I thought a root canal could be no more painful. Or a spinal tap. Not even sure why I watched the damn documentary last night, except beer was involved.

But I’m glad I did. This is a band that should be slapped for writing a song titled By-Tor and the Snow Dog, which still makes me giggle decades on. Their early success, 2112, is a ponderous space-rock concept album that devotees say is best experienced, if not understood, under the influence of vodka and Quaaludes. From my high school days I recall the band’s biggest fans were people you wouldn’t want to be alone with.

The stumbling block for me was always Geddy Lee, the band’s bassist. His banshee-shrieking, kicked-in-the-balls vocals could resurrect a cemetery of skeletons who’d abandon their graves in mute protest. Tunes like Tom Sawyer and Freewill (a wince-inducing ode to whack-job Ayn Rand) were staples of MOR classic rock radio stations. Still are, for all I know. My best recollection of Rush in their heyday was making fun of them with my own band of hooligans out at the lake, blasting the local FM station on a boombox and striking absurd rock-hero poses on the sand whenever a Rush tune was played. Some music ages well. Some music does not. Some sounds just as ludicrous as the day the tunes were pressed into vinyl.

What elevates this documentary to comedy gold is the occasional interview with one of the band’s celebrity fans. When a no-talent peanut head like Jack Black starts using the words “Rush” and “intellectual” in the same sentence, it’s time to pop another beer and stare in amazement that absolutely no one, except me, is laughing. And Sweet Baby Jeebus laff I did, until my tears fell like rain.

Cinema Uprising Copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Keeping Four Wheels on the Road at High Speed

By Steve Evans

I love learning new bits of film history. I live for it. Better than birthdays and Christmas. So I was reading about the short career of James Dean, which got me to thinking about the guy’s death 63 years ago, which led to the discovery that on his fatal drive in that Porsche Spyder he was the lead car in a caravan of friends heading to a race track. About two minutes behind him was Dean’s racecar-driving mentor, an occasional actor named Bill Hickman, who arrived at the crash scene in time for Dean to expel his final breath of air in Hickman’s face. By his own account, Hickman was so haunted he didn’t sleep for five days.

I didn't know that story until today, but I instantly recognized the name Hickman. His destiny was to become a legendary movie stunt driver. Steve McQueen chased him all over San Francisco in Bullitt (1968). Hickman did the high-speed driving for Gene Hackman in The French Connection ('71) and outran Roy Scheider in The Seven-Ups ('73), a little-seen thriller with an incredible car chase as its centerpiece. Hickman drove real cars down real roads, barreling along at speeds well in excess of 100 mph. No computer enhancements or image manipulation. One slip of the steering wheel and he coulda ended up like his pal Dean. Some of us like living on the edge. Hickman took it over the edge and came back to show us the real deal.

Hickman died of cancer in 1986. He was 65. French Connection director William Friedkin called him the greatest driver in the history of cinema. That’s Hickman in the photo below, at right, with Dean lighting a cigarette at left. I'm not sure about the guy hunched over the fateful Porsche. Could be Sal Mineo, Dean's co-star in Rebel Without a Cause. Mineo was murdered in a botched robbery in 1976, but that's another Hollywood story for another day.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.