It's date night! But if those words conjour up soft-focus mental images of putting on a freshly-ironed bowtie, buying a mid-priced meal for a nice girl and capping off the evening with some awkward, sweaty grabass in the backseat of an '88 Mercury Tracer, pump your brakes, fella, because tonight is no teenage romance. Tonight, you're falling in love with Esther. And love hurts.
I was like, and then she was like
See, Esther's going through a kind of rough time lately. She used to live with her mom, worked in real estate and her sole hobby was hanging out in her sparsely-furnished bedroom sharing fluffy, saucer-eyed phone calls with her best friend Kathy. One of these conversations led to a four-person party in a grimy hotel room and, long story short, she's a crackhead now. Also a prostitute. That's the bad news. The good news is, she somehow looks better the more strung out she gets. The OTHER bad news is, she also turns into a murderous, lump-faced maniac right after she smokes up, so hide the kitchen knives, lest you suffer the same messy misfortune as the lengthy parade of crack-addled first (and simultaneously last) dates she's already quite literally ripped through.
To serve and protect from harmful UV rays
And on the subject of her many suitors, admirers and male pursuers, it's only fair to tell you she's got a couple of other men interested in her. When they're not getting into bitchfests or punchfights with one another, a pair of too-cool-for-the-academy buddy detectives are trying to track her down whilst investigating the death of her boyfriend and sugar-daddy Wakeo. He used to be a pillar of the local crack community, but he was recently discovered disemboweled and slumped next to a dumpster by a homeless woman of considerable magnitude, prompting her hysterical, flailing, boob-swinging frenzy that threw out everything I understood about the human body's allowable range of motion.
Absolute poetry
All the best dates are full of memorable moments and Neighbor Hoodz is no exception. A crackhead attempts to share his smoke with a sleeping friend only to have his generosity interrupted by a feral Wesley Willis lookalike who's impaled by a floppy 2-by-4. Some fancy thugs deliver jump kicks to the yellow Los Angeles air while bickering over the superiority of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris or "Chuckie Chan," then rob a woman of her bus pass, because that's "Bruce Lee style, motherfucker." A Jamaican man angrily berates one of the detectives for a sloppily-executed Starsky & Hutch hood-slide ("GLAH GLAH Y'WAN GET KILLED?!"), after which he smiles directly into the camera. Oh, Konami title screen. Ohhh, AIDS blood. So many special memories to carry you through those cold, lonely nights and this is still only the first 15 minutes, before your new girlfriend Esther shows either of her faces.
Ehh, I probably still would
Much too weird to simply be an anti-drug-message street drama and too light on tension and gore to truly be a horror film, Neighbor Hoodz occupies my favorite genre -- uncategorizable, extraterrestrial trash. There's no drought of shot-on-video cost-cutting here, from the crack-monster makeup that looks like it was done with modeling clay to the fringed leather jacket that shows up on so many characters in this film that it probably should've received its own acting credit. Neighbor Hoodz is real cheap, sorta dark, kinda dumb and anything but boring, just like Esther herself. Speaking of which, if you hurry, you should be able to pick her up for your date. Just watch out for school buses when you hit that u-turn and keep an eye on your balls when you're lighting up the pipe.
Chopped nuts
FUN FACT: My copy has a dead bug trapped inside the tape. I consider that a bonus feature.
• 1989: Batmania! Talked my fourth-grade teacher into letting me write, direct and star in a class play that was essentially an abridged adaptation of the Tim Burton film but with a part for Robin written in because I had been religiously watching reruns of the 1966 series. I was Batman, because I already had the costume, which I also wore for Halloween, as well as every other day of the year.
Not even this movie can escape Batman
• 1990: Turtlemania! A major point of pride for me was my complete collection (up to that point) of Ninja Turtles figures and vehicles, as well as a poster for the movie that was surrendered to me by the local theatre owner after continually hounding him each of the five times I came to see it. The following autumn, I won a pair of green foam-rubber practice nunchucks in a carnival dart game and wouldn't leave the house without them stuffed into my belt.
Some ninjerk with dumbchucks
• 1991: Skidmania! Skidmania?! Well, actually, no, but I'm sure some kid somewhere was scooting the backside off every pair of Jams shorts he owned, and his parents had Glen Gruner to blame for it.
The Skid Kid® Skidkit™, only $29.99 at all Kay Bee locations
That year, armed with an 8mm camera, a self-written screenplay and unlimited access to Susan & Steven Wolf's stable of acting offspring, the intrepid Gruner completed his own homebrew superhero adventure to add to the cache of caped/mutant/vigilante do-gooders and wrong-righters that every kid in America was mainlining into their eyeballs at that time -- The Skid Kid! Black-clad like Batman and teenaged like the Turtles, he's Union, Missouri's last line of defense against car thieves, thrill killers and wheelchair-jackers.
Wheelie envy
Scooter Spielberg (played by Gary Wolf and ten different Fake Shemps) is a homeless, orphaned Midwestern high school student who dreams of owning a black Corvette, does overly-choreographed handshakes with his best friend Harold, and actually ends conversations by saying "Gotta scoot!" One day after school, he comes across a pair of magical knee-high motorcycle boots abandoned at the end of two gruesome skid marks in the middle of the highway and immediately absconds with them, knowing they were somehow meant for him. Before you can say "tampering with evidence," he's zipping around town on his ass like a dog with itchy anal glands and skipping class to go beat the snot out of thugs wearing fright wigs and baja hoodies. Scooter's vigilante actions raise the attention of some FBI agents so bungling they can't devise a successful plan to catch him, let alone figure out how it is exactly that he's related to Steven Spielberg, a tidbit of information not even the audience is allowed to find out.
On the black hand side
In fact, there are a lot of question marks that The Skid Kid conjours up. He found the boots, sure, but where'd he get the rest of that suit? Why does it change slightly every other time you see it? And if his boots are magic, why do they need fuel? And how did he figure out that the fuel they need is name-brand cola? Does he have to sit for the boots to propel him? What if he stands? How did he conjour up a skateboard out of thin air for a fourth-grader and for that matter, what happens if he were to ride that skateboard? My analytical adult mind sure has a lot of queries. But you know what? Fuck my adult mind. This movie's for my inner kid.
PICTURED: My inner kid
So the acting is wooden, the padding is obvious, the film stock is cheap, continuity is nonexistant, characters are introduced and then dropped entirely, and it doesn't have a plot as much as it has a beginning, an end and a lot of randomly-inserted action scenes in between. So what? All of this actually works on behalf of The Skid Kid, dropping it squarely in the realm of the backyard opus, somewhere between Don Glut's Spider-Man and Dennis Muren's Equinox. Despite having some postures of a larger-budget production -- a cameo appearance by soon-to-be-TV-heartthrob Scott Wolf (Gary's brother), some very conspicuous product placement (an RC Cola can gets a closeup), a list of credits almost too long to take seriously (three assistant directors?) -- The Skid Kid feels like a real "c'mon guys, let's make a movie" movie and its goofy, unpolished energy took twenty years off my age for about 80 minutes.
No, stop, don't, owie
There were no Skid Kid action figures, no breakfast cereal tie-ins, no Panini sticker books with Gary Wolf's face on the cover, and it's safe to say there will never be a highly-anticipated Blu-Ray or people dressed in Skid Kid costumes wandering around Comic-Cons. Skidmania? Pop culture saturation of this level can hardly be deemed mania of any kind. In fact, the sole physical legacy of this film remains to be a VHS release distributed by Glen Gruner himself and even that's damn near impossible to track down, which is a shame -- The Skid Kid belongs on the shelf of any grown-up unjaded enough to remember how much fun it was to pretend to be a superhero, and any kid who hasn't yet stopped.
"But you're the only guy in town who's got Moby Grape!"
Rich people had it pretty good in the 1980s, what with Reaganomics keeping their bank accounts blacker than Gordon Gekko's soul. But what about kicks? For some, Wednesday night airings of Dynasty and attempts at seducing the poolboy were all the thrill they needed, but for members of the haut monde looking for something more daring, gleefully splattering everything in sight all over their pricey rattan coffee tables was the only way to scratch the itch, and not even the toughest, most tweaked dudes were safe.
Sir Turk The Tweaked
Only minutes after closing time at Poo-Bah Records, a tie-dyed t-shirt filled with hippie is counting the loudest paper currency America's ever produced and the sound has attracted a morally nihilistic post-weightlifting Willie Aames lookalike named Turk, his raccoon-eyed sorta-girlfriend B.B. and his right-hand whipping boy Wimp, who's pretty good at 5's dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas. They're punks and their kicks for tonight are small-time robbery. Just as Turk has taken the clerk into the backroom to empty the safe, enter also Danny (shamefully milquetoasty) and Ginger (Bill S. Preston's medieval babe), who wander in through a carelessly unlocked front door. They're yuppies and their kicks for tonight are evidently going to be letting the punks crash their house party, at the potty-mouthed insistence of Turk. Turk fully expects this party to be fuckin' jammin', and if it's not, Turk will fuckin' see to it that it fuckin' is.
Whore d'oeuvres
With the addition of Rod (a stodgy Aryan Christopher Reeve) and Arlene (the queen W.A.S.P.), it's now four against three, preppies outnumbering punks. Turk wants to "get TWEAKED" -- the best they can offer is champagne. Turk wants to play "jam the camel" with Arlene -- they want to play darts. Losing interest, Turk excuses himself to go raid the house for any manner of pill, powder or injectable liquid with which he can unsober himself. Coming up dry, he returns to the living room to find his sidekick Wimp entirely nude, having been trounced in a game of strip darts. Smelling a fix and enraged at the humiliation of his toady, Turk kicks off a few new games -- Russian Roulette, assault & battery on Rod and trying to force Wimp to rape Ginger (by holding on to the waistband of his jeans and pumping him up and down on top of her like an oil derrick). Now this party is jammin' on Turk's turf! Or is it? Suddenly B.B. is sympathizing with Rod, Wimp is feeling sorry for Ginger and Turk's still getting shut down by Arlene. Where did he go wrong? And furthermore, why hadn't he noticed all the cameras hidden around the house before?
Most non-NON-heinous
Turk, Turk, TURK -- what are we gonna do with you, buddy? I am slightly ashamed to say I liked Turk a lot, at least in the context of Venus Flytrap's fairly reprehensible storyline, which infamously takes its cues from Ruggero Deodato's House On The Edge Of The Park, making Turk our dollar-store David Hess. But while Hess' Alex was motivated by a sadistic, unhinged menace shared in real life only by the psychotically ill, Turk is merely a lunkheaded asshole; all bark and no bite. He carries a studded glove that only gets used for the threat of facial deconstruction rather than actually administering it. His mouth is a veritable Petri dish that produces only f-words, s-words, homosexual epithets and sexist derision, but the tough guy effect is downplayed greatly by a countenance that can only relay either priggish self-importance or frustrated confusion. He's more schoolyard bully than heartless killer, making his eventual fate almost sympathetic. (Almost.)
Roulette's syndrome
Venus Flytrap reaches for filmed socio-political morality play but only delivers goofy shot-on-video filth. Fine by me -- I find the latter much more entertaining. But if there is indeed a lesson to be taken away, it is this: When your record store is closed, it should stay closed, even if you really are the only guy in town who's got Moby Grape. A punk's life may depend on it.
Amongst the thousands of physical copies of films I've accumulated and will likely be buried underneath, I have a short but steadily growing list that I set aside just for the purpose of eventually watching for this site. The criteria for inclusion is admittedly pretty loose, but one of the more recent guidelines I've tried to adhere to is this: the fewer references I can find to a film on the internet or in books, the higher up the list it goes. It did cross my mind that maybe the reason no one's written about certain movies is because they're so impenetrable, so beyond rational explanation as to exist in a place where they cannot be touched by words. I also knew that, eventually, I would come face to face with and be challenged by one of those movies. The day has come. Furious is calling me out.
Howdeedooit
At first, all I could remember were fur and rocks and, for some reason, I couldn't get the theme to SCTV's "Great White North" out of my head, so I wrote it down. Then it was spinning tusks and mysterious boxes, so I wrote that down too. Then, nunchuck deaths and killer chefs, sudden chickens and doggie kickin', beach dismission and pork exposition, skeleton flames and astral planes -- I wrote everything down. Out of six attempted viewings, I had successfully seen the entire thing once, written twenty paragraphs over four and a half pages and I'd fallen asleep five times. That's not just math; that's Furious math.
Jan and Dean and Simon and Tennille
Lest there be any misconception that I was bored to sleep by Furious, this was not the case -- it's just that trying to mentally organize this much nonsense is exhausting and emergency shutdown was the only option my brain gave me. I may never know how to accurately describe this film, but because we're friends, I'll take a stab at a plot synopsis: Mourning the death of his sister at the hands of a white Mongol who's as much a fan of Bob & Doug McKenzie as he is of killing ladies, Simon (played by Simon Rhee) and his red sweatshirt (raglan cut, tucked into the pants) are summoned to an office building populated by screwfaced martial arts students and new wave security guards, where he's given a gift shop medallion and a very esoteric set of instructions by his elderly, estranged tae kwon do teacher (Simon Rhee's younger brother Phillip). Seeking retribution, he soon finds himself beating the will to live out of dudes in exotic locales such as the middle of a field, the top of a cliff and a restaurant with a floor show that features a man spinning swords within five feet of a baby's face to a sparse audience of old ladies messily eating baked chicken. Occasionally aided by Hawaiian shirt aficionados with butt-cuts, a troop of scrappy karate kids and a gossipy Buddha statue, Simon eventually gets his revenge on his sister's murderer, but to defeat the true source of ultimate evil, he's gonna have to get FUURRRIIIOOUS! Or something like that.
Easy spirit
If it wasn't clear enough already, this is not your standard martial arts revenge flick, something that's immediately signified by the closeups of flubbed sleight-of-hand card tricks in the opening credits, accompanied by the exasperated sighs of the performer. So is it a farce? We've got death incurred by a butt-ful of throwing stars, an Eastern European sorcerer who shoots chickens out of his fingers and a Devo-esque synth trio breaking up band practice to go join a fight, but as to whether or not this is intentional comedy or just willful weirdness, the movie's keeping its mouth zipped shut. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum throughout, with the first spoken line ("All riiiight!") arriving at the twelve-and-a-half minute mark. In fact, only two characters in the film have significant speaking parts; neither are Simon Rhee, but one is a dying pig. Fight sequences are underscored by too-quiet background music seemingly lifted from Republic Pictures serials with sound effects provided by firecrackers and drum machines and are directed with such laconic detachment that they almost don't qualify as action scenes.
Whitey Cleanshoes and the Milktones
I can't remember when I've been so stymied by a film, and, in keeping in tradition with everything else I don't understand about Furious, I really liked it, even though I couldn't begin to tell you why. That said, I'm still not sure if it was a real film or a particularly screwy feature-length sizzle reel for Simon Rhee's kickfighting prowess. It's also entirely possible that I just dreamed the whole thing. I hope so. Maybe if I go back to sleep right now, there'll be a sequel.
You know what I like? The opening credits of Night Court. Particularly those establishing shots: newsstands, horse-drawn carriages, yellow cabs driving over steaming sewer covers, young people really enjoying second-hand cigarette smoke. Across nine seasons, a total of thirteen of these shots were used, which weren't nearly enough to sate my personal need for b-roll footage of mid-1980s New York City. Luckily for me, some enterprising filmmakers anticipated that very need while attempting to turn a bestselling joke book into a comedy video.
The Jerk
It's a particularly rough first day on the job for rookie New York cabby Stuart Michaels. He's been screamed at by another cab driver about the color of piss, has unwittingly offended a carful of electro enthusiasts and flaccidly attempted to help a blustery old rich woman and her sweaty, caustic son find a necklace that was never lost. Oversensitive Stu's ready to hang up his keys and go back to his old job at a soda warehouse when fellow cabsmith Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis shames him into sticking with the job, tacking on some conversation-initiating advice: "Shtaht off widda joke!"
The Breakfast Club
The ice is broken. Welcome to open mic night in the back of Stu's cab. A veritable United Nations of passengers spout off a nigh-ceaseless marathon of racy chestnuts ("Whatsa difference between a snowman and a snow-woman? SNOWBAWWLLS!") until even Al, Comic Cabby's foremost purveyor of prosaic one-liners, can take no more. As for me, the entire montage was filmed on location in a moving vehicle, so I had plenty of Reagan-era Big Apple scenery to arrest my wistful gaze, though who wants to stare at New York's finest decade through a greasy taxicab window? I want to see it with my eyeballs unprotected, right up close and obscenely well-lit. Little did I know, all I'd have to do is listen to one perfectly embarrassing rap song (I give it a B+) and witness Stu fail to secure the phone number of a lady passenger as beautiful as she was corny (get your head outta your ass, Stu) and my ticket to Establishing Shot Heaven would be validated.
City Lights
The be-leathered hinder of a magenta-haired punk girl! A payphone with its receiver broken in half! An alley cat giving the camera the stinkeye! Pantry Supreme! And, as if everything leading up to this wasn't already thrilling enough, a neon sign screaming the word "TRASH" in Shatter font! With that, I know that these frames weren't included as mere padding; they were put here, on this videotape, for me specifically, to fill the hole in my being that Night Court hath dugged. I'm only starting to come down off this potent assortment of images when I realize that Stu is too distracted by a seemingly-libidinous passenger's boobs in his face and her left hand sliding down the front of his Members Only jacket to notice that she's stolen his earnings from a cigar box in the front seat. Business before pleasure, Stu. Get your head outta your ass.
Muppets Take Manhattan
Sudden pennilessness leads Stu to another life-decision crossroads and a hobo with a windshield-washing kangaroo puppet that sounds like a snide Caroll Spinney does nothing to ease his disquiet. Once again, Stu the Quitter wants to throw in the towel and, once again, he seeks out Al's advice. This time, however, Al is too deeply embroiled in some lottery-cracking gibberish with another old-timer (it's easy; you gotta bidsha frimya cayman before you hibda the slibnatz) to listen to Stu bellyache and sends him packing.
Soul Vengeance
Stu decides to pick up one last fare before he shuffles back to his night shift at the soda warehouse and ends up chauffering an overbearing animal bites supervisor and his best friend's Southern belle sister on a citywide sightseeing tour, musical montage-style. Naturally, this means more establishing shots, but the best that can be produced is a quick clip of a live crab being tossed into a paper bag by a set of tongs. The movie shrugs at me and admits that it blew its load with Neon Trash. Stu, on the other hand, has mastered the cabby's art of idle repartee during the journey and has come away from it confident and invigorated, head finally outta his ass. He even manages to thwart a second cigar box robbery with some quick-thinking brake application, after which he makes the would-be bandit strip down and do the walk of shame right into police custody, adding an extra layer of insult by repeatedly squirting him in the nothin's with a water gun.
Taxi Driver
I'm all for insurmountable movie concepts, but a filmed version of Jim Pietsch's "The New York City Cab Driver's Joke Book" seemed like it was going to be a tough watch, even for me. I know I've already expressed my affinity for the Night Court opening, but did I also mention that I greatly enjoy the Munsters, the Muppets, and 1980s novelty rap? Well, I do. Comic Cabby managed to fill each of those four glasses just exactly to the point where I was able to get video-drunk enough to overlook its faults and enjoy myself, even if I am going to feel a little guilty about it when I wake up tomorrow. That said, I've got one for ya:
Q: What does Comic Cabby have in common with your next-door neighbors having sex?
A: They're both a lot of fun to watch until someone catches you.
I slid the tape out of the cover to check the condition and was immediately overcome with disappointment. Instead of finding "bloody horror at its best," as the back of the box had promised, I was staring down a stray copy of Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw. Shenanigans! Boyle's Joyland had bamboozled me! I checked the rest of the tapes, hoping that Death Nurse would turn up safely inside a different cover instead of being lost out in the world somewhere, naked and alone. No luck. Not even the mighty internet would prove to be of much use in locating a physical copy in the years to come. I had all but given up on Death Nurse and I ever crossing paths again when, in 2012, Slasher Video teamed up with writer/director Nick Millard and gave me the long-overdue opportunity to check into the Shady Palms Clinic.
Eat-Em-Ups
Gordon and Edith Mortley are the brother-and-sister medical team that run Shady Palms, which is less a medical facility than it is the house they live in. Doctor Gordon wears swishy, ill-fitting slacks, eats chocolate ice cream by playing "one for you, one for me" between the bowl and his mouth, and frankly, he's a wimp, likely the result of a childhood of untold psychological tortures at the hands of big sister Edith. Edith -- the angel of mercilessness of the title and cover image -- is large and intense, keeps piranha rats in the garage (two of which are shown), and punctuates her sentences with a granite-eyed stare that not only commands the camera to repeatedly zoom in on it, but also has the power to quell the interminate cough of a tuberculosis patient.
Stare-Em-Downs
The Mortleys use the clinic as a means for fleecing Medicare out of cash for their patients, though it's unlikely that they've ever been medically certified and, therefore, equally unlikely that a patient will survive even a single day in their care. If Edith isn't asphyxiating them with pillows or feeding them rats, Gordon's inserting dog hearts and mismatched sets of steak knives inside them. On their time off, Edith takes nightmare-filled naps on the couch and Gordon trades a recovering alcoholic booze for sex. Their only problem is a meddling social worker who likes to check up from time to time on the people she's escorted to Shady Palms. The Mortley solution? Dig 'em up, spray off the dirt with a garden hose in broad daylight and pull a junior Weekend At Bernie's on her. However, entry-level corpse puppeteering can only work for so long until somebody gets suspicious, and if there's one thing Edith and her butcher knife don't cater to, it's a nosy old bitch (her words, not mine).
Kill-Em-Offs
People exhibit only mild discomfort while being dismembered. A cat appears from nowhere to make off with a heart during a transplant. Shots are repeated multiple times and often linger to the point of awkwardness. Stilted dialogue and tape rolls abound, and to top it off, it appears to have been shot and edited on consumer-grade video equipment. It's unquestionably a gutter film, but a sincere one, and the same fantastically inept things that make it charming to trash-film votarients will no doubt serve as subjects of ridicule to the "so-bad-it's-hilarious" crowd. If you're the latter, just stick to the film and go no further, but for those wishing to fully appreciate Death Nurse on its own terms, the 25th Anniversary DVD is more than accommodating.
Hose-Em-Offs
In addition to a full-length commentary track (where the genial Millard is joined by his wife Irmi and moderator Jesus Terán of Slasher Video), there's a Q&A with Millard about the film, a photo gallery, a newly-produced outtake entitled "Shady Palms Waiting Room" (with Nick and Irmi reprising their roles as clinic patients), a particularly damning on-camera review from VHSCollector.com's Paul Zamarelli (who considers this the worst film of all time), and longtime Millard collaborator and Death Nurse star Priscilla Alden receives a 14-minute tribute featurette which includes scenes from several of her collaborations with Millard, including Funeral Parlor (the last Millard/Alden film completed before her death from diabetic complications in 2007) and some particularly interesting promo footage from Mad Midnite Movies, a proposed television series that would've featured Alden as a horror film host in the character of Nurse Edith Mortley.
Sit-Em-Downs
Nick Millard stated that if he had a million dollars to make one movie, he'd just make lots of small movies, as cheaply as he could. It's comforting to know that even with a suitcase full of cash, Death Nurse would've turned out the same way -- a languid but astonishing hour of home-movie horror at its most cost-effective and unpretentious. Thank goodness. Had I known nine years ago that I'd be in for an introduction like the one this DVD release provided, the wait would've been a lot less difficult.
It was 10:35pm Saturday when I pressed play. Thirty seconds of darkness later, it's 5:40pm Thursday. An overdubbed voice declares that someone's son is alive, and that's fine, but someone else's son is dead. I soon learn that I'm in the company of Rick & Mike. I don't know which is which -- they both have mustaches, Harley-Davidson shirts and shotguns -- but they are ready, motherfucker. "BORN ready, son." And before I even get a chance to really meet them, they're out the door to go see Angelo and get them some payback. A Solar Quest arcade machine sits unplayed and an aspiring young rapper goes unheard.
Oh, that's just super
Then, following a massive Video Toaster seizure (remind me to dial 976-HOT), the film starts having trouble focusing. Angelo is screaming about cattle at a roomful of men who angrily shout one-digit numbers back at him. A shirtless teenager offers to kidnap somebody. A dude with a cigarette up his nose bursts through the front door with Cinderella, who's just as high as the collection of junkies stumbling around the Red Room. Someone wearing a yellow t-shirt is finishing up a yellow phonecall. An intergender fistfight is being won by a woman in purple suede boots. Everyone regardless of locale is startled at once by the sudden sound of shotgun blasts; evidently, Rick & Mike have come to collect. I, meanwhile, am disoriented. As the tide rolls in on a grey beach, my watch says only ten minutes have passed but the screen informs me that it's been almost fourteen hours. I find myself in no position to argue -- I've already become a hostage of this film and I've seen what it can do. Luckily for me, it's only just started.
First date jitters
While I would never call it perfect and it's possible that it's not even good (who am I to judge?), Desperation Rising IS absolutely amazing, and here's why: On the surface, it's a revolving-door parade of nameless scumbags moving through a series of disjointed scenes about drugs, prostitution, gang warfare and financial seminars, but underneath the crass stereotypes, cartoon-grade vocal dubbing and aggressive illogic is the beating heart of writer/director/star Jason Holt, pumping life into every single scene in the film, no matter how brief or inconsequential they may seem.
I promise this is from the same movie
Like many a no-budget genre film, Desperation Rising is cheap and hilarious (where else can you see the future director of The Notebook being perturbed by a woman licking shaving cream off his face?), but it's also effectively unnerving, its own weirdness preventing it from ever becoming a joke. Holt supersedes his financial constraints and the shortcomings of his actors by obliterating your helpless brain with abrupt, reckless edits and one of the most inscrutable sound mixes ever applied to home video. The sticker on my VHS cover proclaims "ACTION," but those roundhouse kicks don't fool me -- this is an experimental video collage wearing an action-movie costume.
Nappin' and cappin'
As the credits end, I realize that Stockholm Syndrome set in a long time ago. If I learned anything at all from my time spent with Desperation Rising, it's that heroin is better than Angelo's foot, small electrical appliances are all you need, the answer to all life's questions is "insured municipal bonds," and, no matter how sleazy the world gets, an impotent stockbroker can still find the strength to lead sex slaves to freedom and a potential rapist can learn what it truly means to care. Doesn't make sense? Doesn't matter. Surrender yourself and live happily ever after.
When a film opens with a super-tight shot of a shimmery, turquoise belt buckle, you might think to yourself, "Well, self -- someone is about to get naked," or, "Someone is so about to get sold some authentic Native American Jewelry." Nope, it's neither of those. Someone is just gonna do some open-air peeing, and that someone is Chuck. Chuck is a hippie -- a man who loves his freedom almost as much as he loves his secondary minerals and HAM radios -- and, this being 1975, you couldn't even pick up the newspaper or take your grandmother for a walk without getting your Florsheims damp in a puddle of hippie piss. The more comfortable you were with peeing outdoors, the freer you were, and let me assure you: Chuck is FREE, baby.
Chuck's mom knew exactly what to get him for Life Day
Urine-soaked openings aside, Pick-Up has little to do with pee-pee and even less to do with Ford F-150's. Freewheelin'-as-hell hippie chick Carol and her introspective-as-hell bestie Maureen are inexplicably hitch-hiking in the Florida Everglades when they are picked up (title clues!) by our roadside urinator Chuck, who has been tasked with driving a tricked-out, groovy-as-shit Hump Bus to...well, somewhere. Chuck's loaner rig has it all, from a wall-mounted 1970's rotary phone to a swingin' kitchenette. What's that? Oh, so you think you can pretty much fill in the blanks from here, do ya? Well, think again! Okay, okay -- you're right, there is a lot of nudity (the good kind), but once the bus gets stuck in some mud during one of those freak Everglades Plot Device Rainstorms, things take a turn for the weird. And if there's one thing I know about scary Floridian swamps, it's that they're filled with spooky theremin music, dirty priest flashbacks galore and the Priestess of Apollo.
A typical day in the Everglades
Not two minutes into this swamp business, Chuck and Carol are off hunting raccoon babies in the marshes and Maureen is tripping the light fantastic with Apollo and his minions. Shortly following her solo sex scene on top of a swampy, marble, sacrificial altar, Maureen accepts the Scepter of Apollo, and Carol most definitely kisses a baby raccoon. Yes, it is exactly that straightforward. What follows is what happens when you watch Easy Rider too many times and realize that it would be a much better movie if you took the "trippy graveyard scene," substituted Fonda and Hopper out for naked hippies and inserted a healthy dose of Greek mythology. We've all been there, right?
Awwww
Carol and Chuck make the most out of their time trapped in the swamp by shedding those oppressive clothes and humping the hours away on everything nature has to offer (including a homemade sex swing!) and loner Maureen is kept company by a roving senator, a little self-inflicted campfire stigmata, and an oh-my-GAWD-creepy clown. So don't worry about Maureen -- she's good. But I think the real moral of the story here is: don't ever play dress-up in togas and attempt some nighttime sex on a swamp altar, because Bobo The Pants-Shittingly-Scary Clown and The Voyeur Senator will most definitely show up and try to spoil your evening. But you've got to persevere and just bone your way through the distractions -- this movie is going to end soon! These are just the kinds of cautionary tales that the Everglades provide for us, my friends.
Carol's dancing gains the approval of the Everglades Rotary Club
"But are the hippie chicks hot?" Of COURSE they are, dummy! And super out of circulation, to boot! Good luck finding these junior Meryl Streeps in any other 1970s custom-bus, boobie-filled, sacrifice-fantasy movie. These ladies (and the director, too) knew they had hit gold right out of the gate and decided to quit while they still had most of their dignity. Luckily, Carol makes the most of her debut/swan song by going "half monty" at the six minute mark, during an enticing(?) dance that looks like it was choreographed by a drunk Thom Yorke (but only on a dare).
Come for the peeing. Stay for the boobs. And the dancing. And the clown.
For the next 110 unsubtitled minutes of your life, you and Sompote Sands' Magic Lizard will waste time together in ways you never dreamed possible. I hope you packed some wet wipes.
Magic sold seperately
Our hero, Magic Lizard, is a seven-foot-tall frilled lizard and a below-average roller-skater. His sole responsibility is to guard a cave that houses an extremely powerful and coveted crystal, a job that he carries out by sleeping and scratching his lizard balls. This level of security poses no problem to an invading alien (courtesy of an earlier effort by director Sompote Sands, Jumborg Ace & Giant), who chases Magic Lizard around with a lightsaber and eventually steals off into the cosmos with the crystal. Magic Lizard awakens his also-napping boss (the previously-mentioned Giant) with a blast of steam from his mouth and reports the theft in a frantic, high-pitched woman's voice. The Giant awkwardly flies off to retrieve the loot -- alone -- and Magic Lizard, incessantly chattering away for the remainder of the film, is free to completely waste a perfectly good day off work.
Sic 'em
He's dancing with baby elephants! Rough-housing with a bear cub! Using his tail as a boat propeller! Saving the village from a mean ol' crocodile! Taunting an elderly herpetologist, Scooby Doo-style! And the monkeys are goin' coconuts! Then, with only a couple minutes left of the film, the Giant catches up with the alien on an asteroid, effortlessly blows him up, flies back to Earth to return the crystal to Magic Lizard, the end. But who needs a plot when you've got talking jungle animals?
And who needs jungle animals when you've got ladies?
Sompote Sands' main focus as a filmmaker seemed to be Thai-ifying the Tsuburaya library of rubber-suited heroes and giant monsters (a practice that inevitably attracted a flurry of lawsuits), but Magic Lizard, at least for me, has way more in common with Ray Dennis Steckler's The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters than any episode of Ultra Seven, in that both were patched together out of slapsticky vignettes, seemingly made up on camera with no semblance of a greater story arc to be found. The Bowery Boys' influence even appears in both films: Steckler's uncanny Huntz Hall impersonation in Lemon Grove Kids, and here, in a lengthy scene where two dim-witted treasure seekers are spooked during a cave heist by an autonomous, cackling, haunted-house skeleton. Steckler, however, had the good sense not to grime up his whimsy by including scenes involving sex, gore and actual feces. Oh, did I forget to mention that?
The amorous Mr. Bones
A well-endowed skinny-dipper has an underwater frolic with her boyfriend, who manhandles her sizable breasts and tries to fit one in his mouth when, suddenly, she's eaten by a crocodile. Later, the croc gruesomely devours a few others, chasing after one with the fleshy, sanguine remains from the last dripping from his jaws. Most heinously, Magic Lizard is thrown from the back of a live water buffalo that does not wish to be ridden and receives an overflowing mouthful of the beast's, um, "retaliatory discharge." It's all fun and games until you have to watch the poop ACTUALLY COME OUT -- like a sloppy, nightmarish Play-Doh Fun Factory -- and rest assured, this movie's not playing around.
This is pretty much how I felt the whole time
Sands recently claimed that Magic Lizard was produced as a TV movie at the behest of a Japanese network. If you're a Japanese television station in 1985 and you're going to show a close-up of a ten-inch-wide buffalo turd being grunted out into plain view, do you have to warn your viewers ahead of time? Because I tried to get a few different friends to watch Magic Lizard with me, and I only thought it fair to warn them.
