The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Betsy Russell (who went on to play Jill in the Saw films!) plays Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd, a spunky young woman who works as a mechanic and is building her own race car. Her best friend Seville Ritz (Christie Somers) is an aspiring actress, which conveniently leads the film into digressions such as a dance audition and subsequent co-ed shower scene. Take that, Starship Troopers (1997)! One day, millionaire playboy and racing team owner Ernie Leeds, Jr. (Eric Douglas, Kirk Douglas’s youngest son) comes in to the garage where Tommy works to pick up his Leedsmobile and brings along a friend. Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher) is an up-and-coming race car driver, and in case there’s any question about what sort of relationship he and Tommy might have, it is clearly pointed out that Tommy has a poster of Starr hanging up in the garage. Yep, clearly these two were made for each other.

  Too bad Tommy has a mean competitive streak, and is fiercely independent. These are two character traits in ladies that films have taught us are bound to lead to romantic complications, and Tommy’s story is no different from God knows how many other romantic comedy/drama heroines whose supposed “difficult” nature makes them tough for a good man to tame. Suddenly the film’s gender politics aren’t looking so progressive. Seville begins to seem like the voice of reason with her desperate attempts to land a rich man so she doesn’t have to work, but Tommy isn’t having it. Eventually she challenges Starr to a race, and the winner gets the endorsement of Leeds for their race car. Starr has his multi-million dollar machine, while Tommy only has the scrappy little racer she built from the ground up with her own two hands. She doesn’t stand a chance– or does she?

  Spoiler alert: she does. If you don’t want the ridiculous ending of the film spoiled, you should skip the next paragraph. It’s such a bizarre and misguided ending, though, that it completely throws the rest of the film into a different light, and it has to be mentioned.

  In case you didn’t have any problems with the film’s, er, “delicate” handling of gender issues up until the end, the finale will probably be the breaking point. Unsurprisingly, Tommy soundly beats Randy in their race, but instead of winning the endorsement of Leeds to be his team’s lead racer, Leeds switches the deal so that Randy will remain the lead racer but will drive Tommy’s car, while Tommy will be the head of Randy’s pit crew. The weirdest part: Tommy is totally fine with this sudden switcheroo. It’s such a shocking betrayal of the audience’s expectations, and completely goes against what we have been led to believe how Tommy would react in such a situation. Suddenly, the stubborn, fiercely independent young woman who makes her own way in life is happy being subordinate to a man whose abilities are obviously inferior to her own. Cue credits and mass shaking of heads in the audience. What the hell just happened?

  Tomboy might be decent background entertainment while you’re doing other things. Every so often you’ll look up to see something of interest– someone in a shower, a car and a motorcycle locked in a death race, people partying at the Leeds mansion, etc. But if you actually are watching the film and paying attention, you’ll likely feel cheated by the film’s ending and the uncomfortable mixed messages it seems to send. Maybe this is why no one’s done a book of feminist readings on Crown International Pictures.

  Triangle (2009)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 2 February 2010

  The best way to watch Triangle for the first time is to know as little about it as possible. This is a trait that it shares with a few similar recent films, but mentioning their titles would be saying too much. Hopefully the following three facts will be enough to convince you that this film is worth seeing: it was written and directed by Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance), it stars Melissa George and it involves strange happenings on an abandoned cruise ship. Knowing much more than this will at least partially spoil the experience, so in case anyone wants to continue reading this before watching the film I’ll try to tread carefully.

  Melissa George plays Jess, a waitress and mother of an autistic son named Tommy. One sunny Saturday, Jess agrees to go out sailing with Greg (Michael Dorman) and his friends. After a violent storm capsizes their sailboat, the survivors are relieved when a cruise ship headed in their direction appears on the horizon. Once on the ship, though, they find that their situation has perhaps not entirely improved: the ship appears to be completely abandoned except for the mysterious figure they saw walking on the deck. And whoever that is doesn’t seem to be very happy to have company.

  At this point the film seems to settle in for easy comparisons, but writer/director Christopher Smith has some truly mind-blowing surprises in store. Fans of this sort of puzzle film will find some of the film predictable but certainly not unsatisfying, as some of the pieces fit together in unexpected ways. Melissa George has to carry the entire film, as she’s in virtually every shot, and she absolutely delivers. Without her compelling central performance, the film wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as it is, especially in the last act. When Smith pulls the rug out, it’s a genuine shocker, and a big part of the impact is in George’s excellent performance.

  Triangle would have been on my year-end list for 2009 if it had been available in the U.S. last year, but instead it’s fallen victim to the fate of too many excellent horror films in the last few years. It was picked up for direct-to-video release here in the States, which is a damned shame. Many casual filmgoers will likely dismiss it entirely– the awful cover art doesn’t help matters. As much as it pains me, I’m going to have to hold on to Triangle until my 2010 recap, but there’s no question I’ll remember it. It’s the kind of film that lingers in your mind and draws you back to rewatch while you tease out its secrets.

  Trip with the Teacher (1975)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  Say what you will about it, but there’s no arguing that Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) was hugely influential. A wave of nasty low-budget shockers followed in its wake all through the 70s, all of them trying to reach the sadistic heights (depths?) of Craven’s groundbreaking film and some of them with tricky soundalike titles like Last House on Dead End Street (1977, a classic in its own right) and House on the Edge of the Park (1980) (which actually shared one of its stars, David Hess, with Last House on the Left). Relatively cheap and easy to shoot, numerous grimy torture and revenge films began making their way to drive-in screens and grindhouses, each hoping to find even a part of the success of The Last House on the Left. Never a company to miss hopping onto a profitable bandwagon, Crown International responded to this movement with Trip with the Teacher.

  The plot is very simple: a trio of bikers happen across a busload of high school girls on a field trip. The bus has broken down, and while one biker goes back to get help, the other two torture, rape, and murder the girls, their teacher, and the bus driver. Well, the bus driver gets off comparatively easy– he just gets run over by a motorcycle and he’s out of the picture. None of the other bus passengers are so lucky, but in the end the teacher turns the tables and takes sudden, violent revenge. One gets the impression that maybe the first draft of the script was titled Last House in the Middle of the Desert before someone in the marketing department decided that Trip with the Teacher might trick audiences looking for something else. A sequel to The Teacher, perhaps?

  Given that the story line is so simple and familiar, the specifics are what make Trip with the Teacher stand out from the crowd of similarly-themed grindhouse flicks. For one, the lead biker Al is played by Zalman King! Yes, the same Zalman King who would go on to become a legend of softcore cinema, director of such erotic films as Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986), Two Moon Junction (1988), and creator of The Red Shoe Diaries (1992). King’s acting career included television work through the 1960s and 70s and several films in the 70s and 80s, including Jeff Lieberman’s bizarre drug conspiracy horror film Blue Sunshine (1978). Perhaps the strangest part of all this is that King also appeared as himself, with his wife, in The Beaches of Agnès (2008) by French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda! This doubtlessl
y makes Trip with the Teacher one of the very few Crown International films (if not the only one) to have a direct connection to any films by French New Wave directors. King is easily the highlight of the film, alternately creepy and ridiculous as the twitchy, violent Al, and while it may not be a great performance he’s at least believably weird.

  Brenda Fogarty, who plays the teacher Miss Tenny in this film, appeared in several sexploitation films throughout the 1970s including Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy (1976) (which also starred Sheri Eubank from Russ Meyer’s Supervixens) and Fantasm Comes Again (1977), the sequel to 1976′s Fantasm, both films featuring infamous porn star John Holmes. The rest of the film’s cast is made up of various actors and actresses who did mostly television work and a handful of films, but not much else of note. Strangely, writer/director Earl Barton was a choreographer for films such as Rock Around the Clock (1956) (famously featuring Bill Haley and the Comets), The Five Pennies (1959) (starring Danny Kaye) and the Elvis Presley film Harum Scarum (1965). Trip with the Teacher was the only film Barton ever wrote and directed, and given the fact that his other film work was completely different from this movie’s dark tone, one has to wonder if he was trying to shake off a reputation or if he was just tired of watching dancing people being happy all the time.

  While Trip with the Teacher never reaches the depths (heights?) of violence and depravity of many of its contemporaries, it is still not much fun to watch. There is a rape scene and the girls are menaced by the bikers, and in one case a girl is murdered by being suffocated by having her face shoved into the ground, making this the only film I can think of in which that happens. Still, compared to such harrowing fare as Last House on Dead End Street, Trip with the Teacher seems to lend credence to the theory that Crown International was in the business of making less offensive versions of popular grindhouse films from other companies (see the review of Cindy and Donna for a bit more on that). Too mean-spirited to be camp fun for anyone not interested in rape/revenge and not quite at the level of sadism and brutality those audiences looking for such things would find suitably entertaining, Trip with the Teacher ends up being an ugly mess unlikely to please anyone.

  Unforgettable (2017)

  Originally published 20 April 2017

  Back when the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon was in full swing and the movie was in the works, Lionsgate produced a feature film adaptation of Addicted. The novel by popular erotica author Zane concerned a happily married woman who harbors a dark secret: sex addiction. It was the kind of movie that major American studios hadn’t made since the early 2000s when Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002) was a surprise hit. Not an “erotic thriller,” exactly, but a drama that devoted a fair amount of screen time to sex. Around the same time Addicted hit theaters Sony/Screen Gems had a surprise hit with No Good Deed, a home invasion thriller with an unusually respectable pedigree including Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson in the leads. Both of those films were marketed largely to black audiences, and while Lionsgate switched their focus back to Tyler Perry films to court that audience Sony has made it a point to release a sexy new PG-13 thriller in the Fall (The Perfect Guy in 2015, When the Bough Breaks last year).

  While those films did a decent job of scratching a particular itch, it has been confounding that none of the major studios have really capitalized on the blockbuster success of the Fifty Shades films. Despite each of the first two films grossing well over $100 million, American production companies have apparently been unwilling (or unable) to cater to the audience that made that franchise a hit. Even “mockbuster” specialists The Asylum only did one knock-off (Bound starring Charisma Carpenter) timed to capitalize on the release of the first Fifty Shades movie. So it’s not entirely surprising that it has taken three years for another R-rated film to come from a Hollywood studio marketed heavily on its sex appeal. Unforgettable is the directorial debut of veteran producer Denise Di Novi, and the first real test of whether the success of the Fifty Shades franchise can be replicated.

  Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson) is moving in with her fiancé David (Geoff Stults). David runs a thriving brewery in his California hometown, where he relocated from New York with his wife Tessa (Katherine Heigl) and their young daughter Lily (Isabella Kai Rice). While Tessa appears to be absolutely perfect—as in Stepford-level perfect--something caused a rift between her and David leading to their divorce. Tessa remained in the same town where David lives so they can share custody of Lily, and when Julia enters the picture there is some understandable tension. This tension rapidly escalates when Tessa learns that David and Julia are engaged, information which spurs Tessa on to a campaign of terror to drive a wedge between the two and put her family back together again on her own terms.

  If this sounds very Lifetime Original Movie, that’s because it is: Unforgettable feels like a Lifetime movie that somehow broke out of cable jail and made a run for the big screen. Its R rating gives it a little leeway to be darker and a bit more explicit than its small-screen sisters, although there is no graphic nudity in its sex scenes and not too much profanity to speak of. There seems to be just enough sex and violence to hit the threshold for the R rating, but not enough to make it difficult to edit for screenings on commercial cable down the road. This is an odd choice given the relatively explicit sex scenes of the Fifty Shades films, but given the general skittishness about sexuality in mainstream American cinema it’s not entirely surprising. So what is it that Warnter Bros. expects to draw audiences?

  The cast is a good start. Dawson is typically great, and Cheryl Ladd has a fantastic supporting role as Tessa’s alpha bitch mother. But Heigl is the unquestionable star of the show, really sinking her teeth into the part of the increasingly unhinged Tessa. She plays Tessa as alternately sympathetic and bone-chillingly cold without ever tipping too far into cartoonish absurdity until near the end of the movie. That restraint is actually one of the film’s biggest weaknesses, as it builds very slowly to its inevitable climax. It takes a long time to get there, but the final showdown is highly satisfying. Along the way there are some flashes of what the film could have been if it had been pushed just a little further out: Tessa berating Lily for being scared of riding a large horse (spitting “You are not getting off this horse,” barely keeping a lid on her rage), baiting Julia with stories of her and David’s sexual exploits, staring at herself in three separate mirrors while doing her impeccable makeup as Lily looks on. As much fun as the film is, it’s a shame it didn’t use the freedom of its “adult” rating to go truly bonkers.

  But the question remains: Is it any good? Well, the trailer for Unforgettable lets you know exactly what you’re in for. This isn’t Barry Lyndon. It’s a big-screen Lifetime movie with slightly more risqué content, the kind of thing that used to hit the screens regularly in the 1990s in the wake of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct but hardly gets made any more. It’s competently produced and directed, again recalling Lifetime productions but with more Hollywood gloss. It raises and ignores several interesting potential directions its story could go, including the genuinely bizarre fact that Julia and a police detective are the only non-white characters in the movie who have any lines—what exactly is going on in this bizarro white utopia in which Julia has found herself? Why does her best friend Ally (Whitney Cummings) literally never do anything other than sit by her phone and wait for Julia to call? Don’t expect an answer to those questions, or many others. This is a film designed to be watched with a group of people at a certain level of intoxication for maximum enjoyment. If the multiple parties of folks who showed up to the Fifty Shades movies are looking for a similar experience, they’re going to have a great time with Unforgettable. And if that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, you’re probably right.

  Up the Creek (1984)

  Originally published on Film Monthly February 8, 2012

  One of the great things about MGM’s Limited Edition Collection DVD-on-demand service is the fact that while clearing out the vaults, there is no judgment. The goofiest com
edy may be next on the slate for a DVD release, or it could be a lost classic. Or it even could be Up the Creek, a prime example of the sort of bawdy post-Porky’s/Animal House collegiate comedy that flourished in the late 70s and early 80s. For genre completists, this new DVD will be indispensable, but what about everyone else?

  A young Tim Matheson stars as Bob McGraw, the worst student at the worst college in the entire United States, Le Petomane University. Bob, along with the other three worst students, is offered a deal: If they can win an annual whitewater rafting competition, thereby gaining Le Petomane its first win at anything in the school’s history, they will all be granted diplomas in whatever field of study they want. Convinced, the guys gear up for the competition– Gonzer (Stephen Furst), the boorish drunk who can barely speak, Irwin (Sandy Helberg), the neurotic nerd who is terrified of water, and Max (Dan Monahan), Bob’s best friend. And of course, Bob’s dog, Chuck the Wonder Dog (“voiced” by Frank Welker) is along for the ride, too.

  Naturally, there’s a group of super-rich preppies from a rival school that wins nearly every year through blatant cheating. This year they have extra incentive to hate the Le Petomane boys, after team captain Rex Crandall (Jeff East) gets caught cheating on his girlfriend Heather (Jennifer Runyon), who proceeds to hook up with smooth-talking Bob McGraw. Heather and her friends also form an all-girl team, but aside from these three the only other team we spend any time with is an army team that gets disqualified. In retaliation, their team captain Tozer (James Sikking) spends the rest of the movie trying to wipe out all the other teams so no one wins.