In Honor of Bigfoot: The Legend of Boggy Creek

I dunno if you heard, but they found Bigfoot. (He was cruising in Elvis's UFO). Apparently some dudes down in Georgia found a body of a large hairy beast in the swamps known to harbor Skunk Ape, the stinky sasquatch of the South. Unfortunately when they thawed out the freezer with the body, it turned out to be a rubber suit. Big surprise there. Despite finding possum and human DNA in the samples they gave for testing. It looks like someone decided to stuff roadkill in a suit and pull a hoax, but they made a big splash, and who doesn't love a good hoax? I sure do.

Frozen rubber suit and some roadkill = media bonanza

Growing up in the '70s, there was a huge Sasquatch vibe. Bigfoot captured the perfect combination of budding environmentalism and mystery needed to soothe the malaise borne of enormous collars and paisley prints, and the creeping realization that our country was becoming a garbage-covered shithole. The idea of an angry ape in the woods, pissed off at us throwing Chunky bar wrappers and empty cans of Tab on his turf, was a tempting one. Maybe he would beat up Richard Nixon, stomp a Japanese car, and throttle an oil sheik, and we'd be number one again.

Six Million Dollar Man and his lover

There were a lot of Pissed Off Nature movies in the '70s- grizzlies, piranhas, sharks, ants, spiders, whales, frogs, worms, snakes, alligators, and even killer bunny rabbits were all out to get us. Why not sasquatch? In 1973 a quasi-documentary called The Legend of Boggy Creek was made as a low-budget labor of love by Charles Pierce and Earle Smith, who also gave us the eerie docudrama The Town That Dreaded Sundown, about a Zodiac-esque killer who haunted Texarkana in the '40s. This came first, and was perfect drive-in fare; it became a huge hit, making $20 million when movies cost 50 cents. The Godfather only made $134 million! It even inspired The Blair Witch Project with its shaky camera style.
The story told by the narrator is of when he was a child in the '40s, of the Fouke Monster- an apelike creature sighted in "the Bottoms" swampland where Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas meet. It's a haunting area, memorably depicted in Joe R. Lansdale's novel The Bottoms, which isn't about Skunk Ape but you can imagine the beast of Boggy Creek lurking in this area. The movie is more of a nostalgic documentary on rural swamp town life with occasional appearances by a huge hairy beast in the woods that's probably a bear. While it never approaches the documentarian mastery of Louisiana Story or the like, it has a down home charm to it, because many of the people who claim to have seen the creature play themselves re-enacting the sighting, or daily life.

A simpler time, when Indians didn't cry by the river.

Folk songs written for the film, such as "The Ballad of Travis Crabtree," about a young swamp hunter who'll remind you of Huckleberry Finn, give it a "Grizzly Adams" vibe. My favorite is "Where the Creature Goes," where we hear the singer pine for the creature's "lonely cries ringing out over his watery domain."

How I miss his lonesome cry.

The Boss-Man and I watched it one night, and it is definitely a window back to the early '70s. Nowadays the closest you'll get to this is stuff like "Ghost Hunters" on television, where someone recounts a spooky tale while the camera creeps around with night-vision on, and some low-budget effect recreates what they claim they saw right before they pooped their pants. The beast may be a guy in a suit, but they keep him shrouded in the dark woods where only his silhouette can be seen, and the first-time actors do a fine job of being themselves and then shitting bricks. One fellow says he took aim but wasn't sure if it was an animal or a man, and didn't want it on his conscience.

I don't have any beef jerky, dude!

So why are there still bigfoot hunters out there, even though the hoaxer who created the famous "walking ape" footage admitted it on his deathbed? It's something we'd like to believe in. I know I wish we had wild man-apes cavorting in the woods. Or something undiscovered. Cryptozoologists like to remind us that the okapi was "undiscovered" until 1902, despite natives insisting that it was out there, but that was in Africa, a much wilder place.

The sequels to The Legend of Boggy Creek were Mystery Science Theatre 3000 material, but the original has a sort of hokey, low-budget charm to it. Can you imagine an era when something like this would gross 25% as much as something like The Godfather? Well, I guess it still works; The Blair Witch Project made a bundle, was shot on a shoestring and based on vague folktales. I only saw it years later because the Discovery channel ad campaign rubbed me the wrong way. But nowadays when you hike in the woods, you'll joke more about the witch than the sasquatch. Or maybe manbearpig.

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Sweet 70's Cinema: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

With friends like these... that's the unspoken adage referenced in the title. Eddie Coyle is a washed up criminal; a gun runner, a go to guy for thieves and other underworld types. You need something, you go to Eddie Coyle. But Eddie, played by Robert Mitchum in one of his best performances, is tired and old and is looking at a nickel in the state pen for getting nabbed in a getaway car on one of his pal's jobs, and he's taking the rap. He'll do the time without snitching, like a man. Or will he?

Mitchum's hangdog face is perfect for this role, and at this point in his career he was best suited to this character. About the only one who could match him would be Walter Matthau, who played a similar type in Charley Varrick. We watch the cops slowly wear down Eddie's resolve. In the movie's best scene, Eddie is working with a gun runner named Jackie Brown (where would we see that again?), and explains to him why he's so careful who he deals with. Eddie's nickname is "Fingers," and that is because on one of his first jobs he helped with a getaway car and it ended up being traced back to the guys he was working with, who did time. They didn't rat him out, but friends of theirs came to him, put his hand in a drawer, and smashed it shut, giving him "an extra set of knuckles."

He didn't hold it against them; he understood why they did it. He even says, "the worst part isn't when it happens. It's watching, and knowing it's gonna happen." The movie's dialogue has a natural rhythm to it, and isn't affected "crime story dialogue," and has no slang or argot and tough-guy talk. While the film is intermingled with the heists and trades of Eddie's friends, the film is more about watching Eddie slowly succumb to the lure of the detective playing him in.
Peter Boyle plays Eddie's friend Dillon, who runs a bar when he's not managing heists and deals. It was working for Dillon that got Eddie pinched- there's no sentimentality or honor here. "We're all big boys here." Eddie knew what he was getting into, and must face the music alone. That is unspoken, and Dillon feels no guilt for Eddie's family, who will probably go on welfare while he's in the pen. He is of course more concerned about whether he'll rat him out or not...
Their conversations should be used in acting classes. Boyle and Mitchum do not merely act, they embody a part. They can both play tough guys without effort; seeing Mitchum with the sad eyes of a man who is being led to the gate of the slaughterhouse, and the machinations toyed with in his mind as he sees an escape route, are all done purely without verbal cues. The same with Boyle; he is a cold businessman of a criminal, mopping his bar with the same hand he aims a gun; it's all business. There's always the flicker of fear behind his stony face; he knows he could be in Eddie's place.
The film's weakness is the heist sequences in between the drama. Directed by Peter Yates of Bullitt fame, it's exciting enough, but distracting. It involves a group of bank robbers who kidnap a bank manager's family and make him open the vault; they've hit several banks around Boston, and the cops have no clue. Their guns are provided by Jackie Brown, through Eddie; he's been having a hard time keeping them supplied, and a couple of kids who look like Squeaky Fromme and her boyfriend with chin pubes want machine guns; an allusion to the revolutionary fervor of the times and groups such as the S.L.A. The film makes great use of the Boston locations, but the movie is schizophrenic, torn between the tense action of the heists, and the quiet contemplation of watching Eddie realize he has only one way out, if that.

It's rather obvious that this movie was the inspiration for the story Tarnished Angel in Kurt Busiek's Astro City comics; Mitchum even wears a grey suit throughout. That's one of my favorite comic books, about a small-time super-villain who regrets his past life and tries to make good, despite being trusted by no one. If you think The Dark Knight is the pinnacle of what can be done with gritty superhero stories, pick it up for an eye opener (but you ought to read Watchmen first!). The Friends of Eddie Coyle resembles the real-life Boston mob story of Whitey Bulger, who was about to be ratted on by Billy O'Brien before he wound up dead. Bulger is the criminal kingpin who infiltrated the FBI and the Boston PD, whom The Departed was based on (as well as the Hong Kong cop flick Infernal Affairs, of course). Peter Boyle's Dillon is supposed based on a young Bulger, who had consolidated power at the time.
The morally ambiguous ending is reminiscent of another 70's classic, The French Connection, from a criminal perspective. Nobody likes a rat; especially a bigger rat. We know nothing good can come from Eddie's story; he's not the kind of guy to pick up a gun and blast his way out of trouble, and he knows what happens to people who rat. We never meet the wife and daughter he's agonizing over, and this portrait of a small-time criminal is as accurate as you can get. Eddie's just like any other middle class hustler, except when he gets fired, it's permanent. If you like Robert Mitchum or the gritty crime films of the 70's, or modern variations like Michael Mann's Heat and films like it, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a must-see. It is not currently on DVD but may be released by The Criterion Collection soon; it is viewable on Amazon Unbox and played on Cinemax last month.

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Sweet 70s Cinema: The Long Goodbye

Not the goofy movie the poster suggests...

As an unabashed fan of Raymond Chandler, film noir, and Bogart's iconic rendition of Philip Marlowe, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye could thrill or offend me. A lot of fans of the classic The Big Sleep and Chandler's poetic novels find Elliot Gould as a smart-ass, sleepy "Rip Van Marlowe" too much of a change in character; the only pussy he chases is his housecat. If in The Big Lebowski, The Dude is a man for his times, Gould's Marlowe is perhaps a man who fell asleep in the '40s and woke up to the hedonistic, nihilistic '70s.

Still a pussy magnet.

While I like Robert Altman's films, I prefer his experiments with genre, such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which goes beyond even revisionist Western, or his classic MASH, the war movie that's not a war movie. His famous ensemble pieces such as Nashville leave me a bit uninterested, though the excellent Short Cuts, built on a framework of Raymond Carver's touching and painful stories, works especially well. In this movie he plays with point of view; the shots and cinematography are all based on not what Marlowe sees, but how he sees it. He's always outside a window, peering in, vision distorted by the glass. They famously exposed the film to light to dull all the colors in the first two acts, like Marlowe has awakened from a long sleep and his perception is fuzzy, until finally he sees what must be done.

Naked yoga and other '70s delights

Gould is sort of a post-hippie P.I., whose favorite line is "it's alright with me," and it's a surprise that Cole Porter's song of the same name isn't in the soundtrack. There is only one song repeated in many variations throughout, "The Long Goodbye," by John Williams and Johnny Mercer. At first a Tom Waits-like gravelly voice sings it, then a woman, and the motif is even repeated by a Mariachi band when they head to Mexico. The bookends are "Hooray for Hollywood," for a bitter dash of irony. When we meet Marlowe, he is famously trying to get his cat to eat cottage cheese so he doesn't have to buy cat food; he eventually relents, heads out, and slowly gets embroiled in the story. Leigh Brackett, the great screenwriter of The Big Sleep, Rio Lobo and The Empire Strikes Back, takes Chandler's novel and shuffles it around. Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox is on the run; he wants Marlowe to bring him to Mexico, which he does. Later the cops pick up Marlowe and he finds out Terry has apparently killed his wife and committed suicide, which he doesn't believe.

Like The Big Lebowski after it, it throws a lazy operator in the middle of a sleazy conundrum, but Marlowe isn't inept like The Dude, and while there are laughs here, this is no comedy. It's Chandler seen through the gritty eyes of Serpico, except Marlowe is no naïf. By the end, he's as cold as Sam Spade, sending the girl to the gas chamber. Altman's whimsy sets us up for the staccato slaps of brutality the story deals out, and makes them hit that much harder. When Marlowe is picked up by the cops, he toys with them, and rubs the fingerprint ink on his face like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Shortly thereafter he is shown pictures of Terry's wife, with her face battered in.

A story seen through a dirty lens

The case leads him to Roger Wade, a drunken, raging giant of a writer played by Sterling Hayden. With a full beard and fiery eyes, he's like a loquacious Hemingway, staring at the sea with a drink in his hands. He and his wife Eileen, the subtle femme fatale, knew Terry and his wife, and are also mixed up with mobster Marty Augustine, another motormouth psychotic played for laughs at first. Arnold Schwarzenegger has an early role as one of Marty's thugs, sporting a porn 'stache and his Olympian physique; the perfect choice for mob muscle in body-worshipping '70s California. These little jokes aside, the movie is no less brutal than Chinatown; here it plays out with a Coke bottle instead of a switchblade, and in the end, Marlowe can trust no one. Not even his cat.

Sterling Hayden's last great performance.

Gould's Marlowe is a different kind of sleuth. He doesn't deduce, or gumshoe, or beat revelations out of people like Mike Hammer. He drinks in the situation around him, and eventually comes to the likeliest conclusion. He wears a suit and tie among his girl neighbors performing naked yoga, drives a '40s roadster and stops to let a sleeping dog pass, while '70s land yachts honk behind him. When an Old Man becomes one with the sea, he dives in, and later argues with the cops and their useless questions. That's not how you solve anything... you watch and look for the connections.

Only Altman could make a shakedown scene look like gay prostitution.

When Marlowe finally finds the loose thread he has to tug at, he moves with an unusual grace and ruthlessness. He expects to need to bribe Mexican police, but they laugh and pass on his $5000 bill. Detective stories are about a personal code; even when the character explicitly tells us he does not have "a code," the role of the operator is to attempt to tilt the scales toward a form of justice he can live with, whether it is selfish, altruistic, cruel, or magnanimous. Marlowe's last act can be seen as justice, or as selfish. Is he avenging Terry's wife, or is he just pissed off that he lost his cat? The ending is perfect, swift and absolute. Hooray for Hollywood.

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Sweet 70's Cinema: Over the Edge

No, not Over the Hedge with the talking squirrel. This is a serious movie about juvenile delinquency in the 70's, a warning cry like other fine films such as Foxes, River's Edge, and Bad Boys (the Sean Penn one). It's a cautionary tale that leans toward exploitation film, but since it was directed by Jonathan Kaplan, a student of Marty Scorsese, the film has a very realistic feel, almost verité. It's still good viewing today, has Matt Dillon's first screen role, and would make a good double feature with any 70's nostalgia film such as Dazed and Confused.

Young Matt Dillon

The film itself has a sordid story of its own. Supposedly based on true events that occurred in the planned community of Foster City California, it leads in with a lurid disclaimer about how it is based on true events, and how many acts of criminal vandalism by juveniles occur in the U.S. each year. Still, the movie was so controversial that it never got a theatrical release, and instead played on HBO in 1980. The action was moved to the fictional city of New Granada, a planned community that has been demolishing its few youth centers to make way for more profitable businesses, in the wake of 70's stagflation. The script was written by Tim Hunter, who'd later go on to pen the bleaker and better-known River's Edge, and Charles Haas, a journalist who wrote about the original events in an article called "Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree."

The Mouse Pack

Our first introduction to the town's kids is at the Youth Center, a hangar-like building where they hang around. It's painfully obvious that there isn't much to do in this town, and everything seems spread out so you have to drive or bike everywhere. Two kids are on an overpass with a BB gun and they shoot the windshield of a passing police car, who nearly crashes, then gives chase. As the cruiser flies toward the Rec center, two other kids, Carl and Ritchie, hide in the bushes. The cop arrests them on suspicion, and finds a switchblade in Richie's pocket. Matt Dillon plays Richie as the standard rebellious youth; what he lacks in depth he fills with anarchic energy. I didn't even recognize him in this early role, and it shows the promise he'd later realize. Carl is the smaller kid who's always getting dumped on- reminiscent of Ratner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He's played well by Michael Eric Kramer, who never saw stardom after this. It's unfortunate, he plays this part naturally, and we follow him throughout the film.

Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright

Later on their parents pick them up and they get the usual lectures, even though technically they did nothing wrong. The parents are more concerned with the weekend of visit of some Texas millionaires who might invest in the town and solve their financial problems. Carl heads to his room and puts on his headphones, blaring Cheap Trick's classic teen lament, "Surrender." The film's soundtrack is excellent, mostly peppered with lesser known late 70's classics from Cheap Trick and The Cars, with a few others like "Teenage Lobotomy" by The Ramones and "You Really Got Me" covered by Van Halen. Anthems of the era, which really puts you back in the time. It's unfortunate when teen films like this use older songs or covers of them; years later, they'll lose any possible nostalgic value.

Note the leaf on the blackboard

Back at school they are forced to watch an educational film about vandalism, but the principal just yells at their implacable wall of adolescent apathy, and announced a 9:30pm curfew. Later that night the kids go to a party, make out, drink beer, smoke pot, and pass around other drugs; at first it's shocking, especially when you see the tow-headed youngster Tip smoking and dealing. They culled some of the actors and extras from the local town, and this gives the film a documentary feel. As Ebert stated in his 1980 review, it almost feels like we're eavesdropping, or a kid is lugging around a camcorder. (We had them back then, but they weighed 50 pounds). Sometimes there's a gritty, small-time mood like in Scorsese's Mean Streets, and you can see the mentor's touch here. At the party, Carl meets his girlfriend Cory, and they smoke a joint; as he leaves, he gets ambushed by Mark the BB gun kid, who thinks he snitched on him. He and some friends beat Carl up and take his money.

The 70's classic, Destruction: Fun or Dumb?

Carl just can't get a break; back at home his parents are more upset that he got in more trouble than why he's getting beaten up. The parents are clueless but aren't played as idiots; they are just too caught up in their own lives and dealings, and seem to think that kids raise themselves. The next day, Carl lashes out at his Dad by setting firecrackers off underneath the Texans' car, setting the engine on fire, and of course, torpedoing the business deal. The parents then announce that the Youth center will be shutting down a while, since a kid was caught with drugs there. This gives the kids even fewer options to stay out of trouble, and after an argument with his Dad, Carl runs out to hole up in one of the unfinished condos with his girlfriend.

Aimed right at you

One of the girls in their pack stole a gun from her parents bedroom, and they practice shooting cans out in "the fields." They use all the bullets, but later decide to play a prank on Tip, who ratted out Carl to Mark the other night. Richie echoes Dillon's later role in The Outsiders by running around pointing an empty gun at people; this leads where you expect it will, and forces the parents to confront the problems of the town at a big meeting at the school. Who's watching the children during the meeting, you might ask?

Echoes of a Nuremburg rally

From here the film follows a more predictable track, but thankfully we are spared any tearful or overly insightful monologues by Carl or any of the other kids. Kaplan is smart enough to let us draw our own conclusions from the performances, and realize that these kids are facing a profound emptiness from both their parents and the community; we don't need a rehash of James Dean's emotional outburst in Rebel Without a Cause; this film follows that classic's arc closely enough, with Dillon channeling Sal Mineo sans the not-so-latent homosexuality.

Burn it down

Of course with the parents all in one location, the kids decide to lock them in. I was hoping that the film would veer towards the surreal ending of Lindsay Anderson's If... with them burning the building down, but it never gets that bad. The kids do go all "Lord of the Flies" in a matter of minutes, blowing up police cars with stolen guns and fireworks, stealing cars and wreaking havoc. It seems out of place, and spirals far out of control, with a finale that seems more at home in something like Vanishing Point or Crazy Larry Dirty Mary.

Lord of the Flies

What detracts from an otherwise excellent 70's mood film is the ending, and expository dialogue such as the Texan stating, "Seems like you were in such a hopped-up hurry to get out of the city that you turned your kids into exactly what you wanted to get away from." It's deserving of its cult status and succeeds when we're hanging with the kids; it brought me back to my early youth in the 70's, when we often had nothing to do except romp in our "fields," smash up abandoned cars, and cut down trees with tools we lifted from unminded basements. But our little "mixed use" community was tightly knit; we had legions of old ladies sitting on porches to keep us from climbing on the rooftops of disused factories, or other shenanigans. This was a neighborhood so dull that everyone would come out and look when the old greenhorn found a garter snake in his garden and cut its head off with a shovel; the only one of us who went wrong was a kid named Travis whose parents were never around, leaving him to cruise the area on his Huffy, and steal from backyard gardens to eat some meals. One day he decided to throw a cinder block at another kid's head, probably because that kid didn't have to eat raw tomatoes for lunch that day. New Granada in Over the Edge was a whole comunity of little Travises, so perhaps the ending isn't too unreal.

If you want more detail on the film, it has an extensive fan site.

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The Fury ... how I feel about Brian De Palma

I'm going to admit up front that Brian De Palma kicked my puppy as a child, and that's why I don't like his movies. I think he makes good trash, but when people start comparing him to Hitchcock I get apoplectic. Hitchcock made good trash too, but he elevated it, De Palma wallows in it. Hitch also built his movies around dialogue-- I just watched The Birds again and forgot how much of it has nothing to do with the story; yet, we are riveted to the screen. The entire first act is spent in getting Tippi Hedren to the little town that will be swarmed by angry peckers, and it's still interesting. The whole premise is ridiculous, but Hitchcock manages to make us terrified of terns, toucans and ptarmigans.

Young Amy, and Jim Belushi's first role in the back left.

The Fury, on the other hand, beats us over the head with action and manages to be pretty boring. Peter (Kirk Douglas) and his son Robin are on an Israeli beach when they are beset by terrorists; it turns out to be an elaborate plot by his buddy Childress (the always-evil John Cassavetes) to kidnap Robin. Later the story picks up in Chicago, where Peter is trying to track down his son, with Cassavetes still trying to kill the hardy bastard. We learn that the reason Robin was taken is that he has powerful psychic powers, and that leads to a college psychology experiment where Amy Irving's brain is hooked up to a Lionel train set. She plays Gillian, who is psychic too, and Peter seeks her help in finding his boy. Amy was one of the nasty kids in Carrie, and now she gets her chance to throw telekinetics around; unfortunately when she looks scared, her face twists up like Gilda Radner's, and it's hard to take seriously.

Cassavetes once again exuding evil.

I heard it told recently that Brian De Palma's oeuvre is best appreciated when you realize that they are all comedies, and as I looked back, I felt a sense of peace replace my apoplexy at his directing style. The Fury works great as a comedy. Take De Palma's horror masterpiece Carrie, about a powerful psychic girl... and double it. Now there are two, a girl and boy, and they are being trained by the government as weapons by Charles Durning.

Robin has anger management issues.

There are things that make no sense until you realize it works as farce, or as a spoof of Hitchcock that Mel Brooks would envy. For example, after hijacking a cop's car to escape, Kirk Douglas tells them to leave the car after the bad guys chasing them have been dispatched to the courtesy table in a fiery display. Then he inexplicably drives the car off the dock into Lake Michigan. Sure, he's a government agent and has survived numerous attempts on his life by the skin of his teeth, but wouldn't you at least drive to the train station?

Slow... mo...tion...

Then there's an extended slow-motion sequence when one of the psychics escapes, and someone dies in the process. They never seem to learn that if you're touching one of these kids as they undergo their dramatic episodes, blood will start pouring from your orifices like you'd chugged a six-pack of Ebola cola. At first, Amy Irving runs like she's heading for her lover's arms, and then Hester (Carrie Snodgrass) is chasing after her, and then the bad guys in their sedans, and finally Kirk Douglas shows up with a gun, all in gut-wrenching slow-motion emphasizing every grimace on their faces. As drama, or action, it's torture... but as a comedy, I couldn't stop laughing.

Now you'll look up to me, Dad...

De Palma does manage some cute shots- he loves reaction shots in reflected glass- and I liked the scene with Mother Knuckles, an elderly woman Douglas befriends after busting into a tenement, but mostly this must be viewed as comedy. How else are we to take it when his psychic son Robin, who believes him dead at the hands of Arab terrorists, just happens to see a gaggle of sheiks at the Old Chicago amusement park, and plays havoc with them on the tilt-a-whirl? Better yet, when the kid finally cracks during his emotional reunion with Dad, as they dangle from the rooftops. There's no way to take this seriously, and I don't think De Palma wants us to. He's riffing off the B movies of the past. De Palma had to know how ridiculous this all was, and that he got the job because of the material's similarity to Carrie, so he just went nuts with it. It's interminably long at two hours, but in the right mindset, The Fury can be very entertaining.

You won't like her when she's angry.

John Cassavetes's explosive performance.

What everyone remembers is the tacked-on ending, where Amy unleashes her psychic angst on John Cassavetes. It would be topped a few years later with the head-exploding in David Cronenberg's Scanners, but it's hard to beat Cassavetes's severed head floating out of frame in slow motion. The movie ends abruptly afterward, and we assume Gillian escapes. I have fonder memories of Firestarter, which was goofy but at least had a comprehensible story arc. That's saying a lot. De Palma has a lot of style, but unlike say Michael Mann, who can use it to craft a gripping storyline, De Palma seems unable to balance them both very well. Sure, he's made some good movies- Scarface worked because it updated a scenery-chewing gangsploitation film to the 80's, The Untouchables likewise comes from an era where bombastic characters are expected. In Carrie, Sissy Spacek's amazing performance, Stephen King's archetypal story, and De Palma's stylish direction converged perfectly. In Carlito's Way he managed to tune things down a bit and let the good story do the talking, and material like Raising Cain lent itself to his excesses.

This is as terrifying as the prospect of efficient gas-powered vehicles!

If you watch De Palma's movies as a fan of Hitchcock and old gangster films, and imagine John Waters is next to you helping heckle the screen, you can enjoy even his most indulgent films like Snake Eyes, which was a miserable failure. If only he'd gotten face-contorting performances out of Gary Sinise and used a lot of slow-motion and Hitchcockian Dutch angles, we could have had at least a comedy masterpiece.

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Hercules in New York

You'll be seeing a lot of Arnold here in the next few weeks. I've seen most of his movies, and I want to fill in the gaps, no matter how painful. I've been a big fan since The Terminator and Conan the Barbarian, and sort of lost interest when Eraser came out. I decided to get the worst out of the way immediately, so Darth Milk and I watched his first film appearance, Hercules in New York, a low-budget sword-and-sandal movie from 1970. He was credited as Arnold Strong, in case his name scared people off, which seems crazy now.

Sometimes we forget he cut weight for Conan.

The movie begins with some hilarious narration as the camera pans over some mountains, and zooms in to bring us to Mount Olympus. The set is a public park somewhere; you can hear cars going by in the original audio track, which I highly recommend. Arnold's accent was so think that he was dubbed for the theatrical release, and while it's amusing to hear a generic voice come out of his mouth, the movie is much funnier with the restored dialogue. If you thought he was hard to understand in Conan or Pumping Iron, this will sound like crazy moon-man language. And that's saying a lot, because part of the fun in Pumping Iron is realizing that Lou Ferrigno, who was struck deaf at an early age, is usually easier to understand than Schwarzenegger.

"Zumday a real rain iz going to come and clean up zis place."

The movie is pretty horrible, but that didn't stop us from watching it in its entirety. Take one of those Italian Hercules movies starring Steeve Reeves, one of Arnie's heroes, and mix it with Midnight Cowboy, and there you have it. It has plenty of moments of unintentional hilarity and copious cheesiness, and you get to see young Arnold with a bad haircut delivering lines that make you wonder if his nickname "The Austrian Oak" came from his acting instead of his amazing physique.

Far in the dim past, when myth and history merged into mystery, and the gods of fable and the primitve beliefs of man dwelt on ancient mount Olympus in antique Greece, a legendary hero walked godlike upon the Earth, sometimes...

Hercules is bored on Olympus and wants to go to Earth and "browse around a bit." Zeus is having none of it. He's as grumpy as always, and if you thought Lawrence Olivier was chewing the scenery in Clash of the Titans, this guy must have died with it lodged in his colon. He gets sick of Herc's insolence and hurls a lightning bolt, made loving out of silver rebar by some forgotten prop designer, which sends his son tumbling to Earth to teach him a lesson.

Unidentified Flying Olympian

Two little old ladies see Arnold falling past their Pan Am jetliner and are overcome with the vapors over seeing so much beefcake tucked in a toga. Then he's picked up by a ship full of sailors, and ends up getting in a shirtless wrestling match with the first mate because he refuses to take orders. I began to wonder who this movie was supposed to cater to.

Pretzie is extra salty.

Wait, it gets better. When he jumps ship, he's rescued by Catfish from Jabberjaw. I'm not kidding- Arnold Stang, who also voiced Top Cat, plays "Pretzie," a bespectacled New York nebbish peddling-- you guessed it-- pretzels by the shipyard. They nab a cab uptown, not before Hercules grabs a forklift and tries to ride it.

"Nice chariot, but where are the horses?"

As the camp increased to a fever pitch, it became clear that Arnie's first movie was not really a Hercules movie like the Italian ones, or meant to capitalize on his status as Mr. Universe, but was probably crafted on the cheap to play in Greenwich Village theaters. My uncle, who ran gay bars for the mob back in his day, told me Midnight Cowboy was so popular they were showing stolen prints for years. Pretzie sounds a lot like Ratzo Rizzo, but I was surprised to learn that Dustin Hoffman's legendary performance was partly based on Arnold Stang's stage persona- probably best seen in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as the gas station attendant with the Coke-bottle glasses. Instead of Jonathan Winters tearing things up, this time he has to deal with Mr. Universe.

Cameo by Jiminy Glick

Instead of pimping his new pal like Rizzo tried to, he gets him involved in mob-sponsored wrestling matches. They're pretty sad to watch- Arnold is no wrestler, but he gives a good flex here and there. According to IMDb, Arnie got the part because his agent said he had a lot of "stage experience," meaning posing on stage for bodybuilding competitions, which was mistook for work in theater. This is twelve years before Conan, and seven years before Pumping Iron, where he mostly played himself. He improved exponentially in those years. If you thought his alternate under and over-acting was funny in Conan the Destroyer, just wait until a skinny little sailor tries to strangle him here.

Arnie's always been great at emoting struggle.

The plot thickens as Zeus realizes that Herc likes it down there and won't come home. He sends Mercury to get him, who gets rebuffed. I have no idea what Hercules likes so much down here; he spends most of his time talking to a mousy girl in a sweater, the daughter of a professor played by James Karen, most famous for being "The Pathmark Guy" in commercials, and the boss who built houses on a graveyard in Poltergeist. Zeus sends Nemesis down, who slips Herc a mickey that denies him his godlike strength. This makes him lose a strongman competition vs. Monstro, played by "Mr. World" Tony Carroll, another bodybuilder.

Some of the overdressed goddesses.

Pluto even comes on down to try to lure him back, but he seems a lot more like Satan in his dapper suit. There are a few other goddesses in togas up in Olympus, but the filmmakers seem to know their audience isn't interested in girls. By 1970 we already had Barbarella, so Aphrodite could have bopped on down in a bikini, but no such luck. When the mob shows up to clobber the now-vulnerable Herc, we get Atlas and Samson-- on loan from the Bible-- to help save him.

"Atlas, when you're done how 'bout we go for a nosh?"

The best part of the movie for us was the car chase around Central Park, put to frantic zither music. Milky and I accompanied them on the conga drum and ipu gourd. With enough beer and random percussion, the movie is tolerable. I wouldn't recommend this movie to all but the most fervent Arnold fans, and even then you're going to be performing your own version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to keep watching.

The movie is enjoyable with proper application of beer and bongos.

I've seen parts of Arnie's next two movies- The Villain, an uber-campy Western spoof with Paul Lynde (sensing a pattern here?) and Stay Hungry, where Jeff Bridges opens a gym, and Schwarzenegger plays the violin in a fringey cowboy shirt. They're forgotten 70's relics, but I guarantee you they'll be a lot more fun than this. If you like really bad movies, this is for you. For a good bad Arnie movie, watch Commando.

Now we know how Zeus got Samson- he's actually a rabbi.

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The Bad News Bears - 70's goodness

The 1976 Bad News Bears is one of my all-time favorite kid movies. Sure you'll hear shit, ass, nigger, spic, and what not, like Tatum O'Neal talking about her boobs at age 11, Walter Matthau driving around with a cooler of beer in his Cadillac, and other things that would garner this an NC-17 rating today. But it also has some of the best chemistry between characters, and some of the most realistic kids in a movie, ever. I didn't see the remake and have no plans to. Maybe if I lose a bet. I liked Bad Santa, but this movie didn't need to be remade. It's re-played on Turner Classics so often that there's no reason not to see it.

Walter Matthau is Buttermaker, a drunk who made it to the majors once, now hired to lead the worst team in Little League. The team was put together as a test case by a liberal politician, and he hires Buttermaker illegally when no one will coach the misfits. You've got a fat kid, a foul-mouthed little monster, a snotty-nosed little creature, a four-eyed math whiz, two little Mexicans who never speak a word of English, the only black kid on the League, and eventually a girl with a golden arm and a juvenile delinquent who wants to get into her pants.

The movie is one of the pinnacles of child acting. Nowadays the kids are all like the one in The Day of the Locust, you want to stomp them to death. Here they all reminded me of the little bastards I grew up with- bullies, nerds, slobs, and kids with language that would make the Brady Kids strangle themselves with their perfect blonde hair.

Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal are the foundation the movie is built on. He was Hollywood's greatest curmudgeon, taking his Oscar Madison from the Neil Simon classic and turning it into a hilarious career. He could do drama too, just check out Charley Varrick. Tatum's in a sad spot now, but she played some of the best child roles ever. This being one, Paper Moon being the obvious winner. He was dating her mom for a while, and taught her to pitch, before he dumped them. Now he wants her back to help his team, and they have to patch things up. The script doesn't give us an easy win here-- Coach Buttermaker can be a real S.O.B.
The movie tackled parents pushing kids too hard in sports 32 years ago, and it's still a problem. The way the movie ends is one of my favorites. It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. We like to say that platitude, but here in America we love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Even if that winner is a lying, cheating bastard, we admire his gumption. That's the American Way.

The movie hits all the right notes and no sour ones. You owe it to yourself to see it. One of the best sports movies ever, and definitely one of the best with a kid cast. You can skip the sequels and the TV show with Jack Warner, nothing touches the original.

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The Emperor of the North Pole - stabbin' people with my hobo knife

Two of the manliest men in cinema were Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Both of them looked like you could clobber them with a two-by-four to no effect. But what if they each had a two-by-four, or better yet, a fireman's axe and chains, and battled it out? That's the premise of this movie, where Marvin plays a tough hobo and Borgnine is a brutal conductor infamous for kicking freeloaders off his train. Sure, the director said that they symbolized the Establishment and Anti-Establishment, but I think they symbolized Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine locked in a locomotive thunderdome, battling it out on a flatbed rail car, and that's deep enough for me.

Cool Lee Marvin, A #1.

Who didn't want to become a hobo when they were a kid? Nowadays they probably have NinHobo for the Wii, and you have to swing the controllers around to cut open a can of beans, hop trains, and stab people with your hobo knife. But back in the 70's when this film was made, our "controllers" were called "sticks," and we made everything out of them: Rifles. Hobo knives. Lightsabers. It was the Swiss Army Knife of toys, and yep, you could even pretend it was a Swiss Army knife. To be a hobo, all you needed was a stick and a bandanna or a handkerchief, or a washcloth snatched from the sink, tied up around your "bindle" of necessities for life on the road, like a bologna sandwich and a few Hot Wheels cars, for bartering. You could rub some dirt on your face for stubble, or burn a piece of cork if you were feeling audacious.

That's about all that's needed for this movie, too. Except for the trains of course. There's a lot of train porn in this movie. I call it that because train fanatics, or "railfans" seem to be the only people who remember this film, down to the specifics of what kind of train was used, and so on. In Britain they are called "trainspotters" and their activities were revealed in the documentary Trainspotting.

Let's just say the song "Love Shack" is not about him.

The movie starts out by introducing us to Ernest Borgnine, known as "Shack" in the movie. His train is leaving the station and he finds a hobo on it, so he beats him with a club until he falls between two cars, gets jumbled up like a sack of sausages in the laundry, and cut in half by the train. In full detail. This is to let you know that the movie is all about two men beating the shit out of each other, and to go sneak in to The Aristocats one theater over, before you're sick to your stomach, you pansy.


Ernest Borgnine cuts a man in half.

Shack is one mean sonofabitch, but he gets outsmarted by two other 'Bos on the train. One is Lee Marvin, known only as "A #1" because he's Lee Marvin, goddammit, and King of the Hobos. The other one is Keith Carradine, who plays a brash kid so annoying that you wish the two tough guys would stop fighting for a moment and nail his tongue to a tree with a railroad spike. According to the director, he's supposed to represent The Youth of Today. He and #1 tussle over a train car they both hop into, and Shack locks them in. It's a cow car, so when they herd the steers in, they'll be trampled to death. A#1 outsmarts them by ... setting the car on fire, and forcing them to stop the train.

Putting axle grease on a burn, like a real man.

They both brag about riding Shack's train- A#1 to his fellow hobos, and the Kid, called "Cigaret," to the rail men who caught him- raising Shack's fury. He practically strangles the kid. When the hobos find out about the Kid's boast, it shakes A#1's reputation... so he has to win it back. He says he'll ride Shack's train all the way to Portland, and Cigaret claims he'll do it too. The rail men hear about it, bets are made, and the battle is on. The film's title comes from the hobo jargon of calling the greatest of hobos "the Emperor of the North Pole," or king of nothing, aka King Shit.

Probably the best "train porn" in the movie is when Shack hot-rods it out of the station so no one can hop on and freeload. Now trains have schedules for good reasons, because sometimes they share track. And by jumping ahead of schedule he screws things up. Another train is take a side track and they just barely miss its caboose as the brakes screech. It's actually pretty exciting, but there are no big train crashes in the movie.


America runs on Dunkin' Deacons

There's a few funny scenes where they steal clothes from a bunch of evangelicals praying in the river; when he gets unexpectedly dunked, A#1 shouts "Jesus Christ!" and the preacher thinks he's praying. Later they steal a turkey, and a cop chases them into a hobo camp, only to get pranks played on him. Overall the movie is bit on the long side, and the most memorable parts involve Hobo vs. Conductor and the cruel ways they try to defeat each other. Shack's favorite trick for hobos riding underneath a rail car is to tie a lead weight to a rope, and feed it under the train, so it bludgeons them as it flails around. This makes A#1 find a way to lock the brakes, which sends the fireman into the coal oven, and bashes another worker's head in.

If I had a hammer, I'd hammer on some hobos...

This goads him into the final battle, and he stalks along the top of the train with a mini sledgehammer to do them in. Eventually they end up on a flat car, duking it out with slabs of lumber, chains, fireman's axes, and their formidable brawn. It's brutal and ugly, despite the bright red paint blood they used in the 70's. It's definitely worth slogging through the rather slow movie to see two Hollywood tough guys fight it out.

Don't bring a chain to an axe fight.

Ernest Borgnine just has an evil look to him when he wants to- whether he's trying to beat up Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, or as a murderous member of The Wild Bunch, or even when he played alongside Marvin in The Dirty Dozen. Marvin needs no bad-ass introduction. He got shot in the ass in WW2 and played tough guys ever since he was a motorcycle thug in The Wild One opposite Brando. He may have been awarded the Purple Heart, but the most bad-ass thing I ever heard about Lee Marvin was from a rehearsal with John Vernon (aka Dean Wormer from Animal House) when he hit Vernon so hard that the man began to cry.
He and Borgnine were in a few other movies together, like the classic Bad Day at Black Rock, and a Dirty Dozen sequel. He didn't make it to the third sequel,