At the risk of sounding like a mini-megalomaniac – which, the nurses say, is way down my list of disorders – there are occasionally times when, just for a moment, it seems as if the universe truly does revolve around me. I mean, within three months of my arrival in Phoenix, they’ve organised a film-festival. And not just any film-festival, but one dedicated to low-budget and independent movies, with nothing costing more than a million allowed on the premises. Does life get any better than that? Not when we get two all-access press passes to the event, no.
For given the choice between seeing a film with a million-dollar budget, and one costing a hundred million-dollars, I know which one will get my popcorn. The more money that is ploughed into a project, the more people have a finger vested in the pie, and inevitably, you end up with movies written by committees of accountants. Any risks, originality, or spark of life have to run the gauntlet of rewrites, test screenings and studio executives, and the results are…Gone in 60 Seconds…Battlefield Earth…Jim Carrey. Given the choice between hiring Mr. One-Expression, or making twenty feature films, which is better value for viewers, film-makers and the world of cinema in general?
In addition to the independence of vision, low-budget movies offer another advantage: they’re short. Of the seventeen films in the festival, the longest ran for just 101 minutes, because when you’ve got no money, every frame has to count. These are like blow-darts, make the point and stop, unlike the overblown epics coming out of Hollywood. There, you might as well smash the rock over the viewers’ heads a few more times because it’s someone else’s money anyway.
This helps explain why, of the eight films seen over the weekend, all were worthy of respect; they might not have been perfect (unsurprising, when you can often afford no more than three takes), they might not always have succeeded in their goals, but you can only applaud all the makers for their efforts, especially in the face of shooting schedules as low as ten days. These people are the future of cinema, and deserve support and recognition every bit as much as Hannibal – which I saw on Sunday night after leaving the festival, and can honestly say was less enjoyable than every movie in it. Two films, Vice and Boys From Madrid, are already contenders for my ten best of 2001, and Green would have followed them, if it hadn’t been made in 1997. My only gripe was an excessively parochial feel: all the features were English language, and only one came from outside North America. That, I suspect, comes down to submissions rather than any conscious decision, and next time, as an “established” event, I hope for a more global selection. On the other hand, it was an additional pleasure to see shorts, not only in their own programs, but alongside the main features.
The event took place in a far-off corner of the 24-screen AMC megaplex in downtown Phoenix; if this smacked of sell-out to The Man, at least we got comfortable stadium seating with lots of leg-room for our souls, and it was a salutory experience to walk past the likes of Saving Silverman on the way to the festival zone. Once there, it was like entering another country because, as well as the content, the atmosphere was great. Most entries had directors, producers and actors in attendance, who were delighted to talk about their work afterwards, in sessions of excellent informality. Everyone was approachable and friendly, and additionally, a lot of guests hung around to see other people’s movies, a major plus compared to other festivals I’ve attended.
On the down side, an unfortunate number of screenings were plagued with technical problems: the video projection was particularly awful, with bad colour and shortcomings on sound – where there was any at all – but even some of the film projection was not up to an acceptable standard. These gremlins led to films starting anywhere up to half-an-hour late, and this had a knock-on effect, delaying both later movies in that screen, and in other screens since people might have tickets to them as well. At $10/film, it was pricey, especially for the video-projected films (a fact not mentioned in the program!) and the ticketing system itself seemed strange. If you bought a ticket to a specific movie, you (theoretically) might or might not get in, since priority was given to those who’d bought one-day passes.
I say “theoretically”, since none of the screenings we went to were sold out, with the majority less than half-full. While this is perhaps fortunate in the light of the above, it’s otherwise a shame, and I think the festival could have done with broader publicity – on several occasions before the weekend, we mentioned it to people and their reaction can be summarised as “Huh?” However, everyone we spoke too at the event had a thoroughly good time, so there should be plenty of positive word-of-mouth for next year. It’s a festival that certainly deserves to be a success, and I’m already looking forward enormously, to bigger and better things next year.
[Thanks to Golan Ramras for the press passes, and Chris Fata for editorial assistance, festival liaison, her comfy shoulder and enough Diet Coke to float a battleship…]
For more information on this year’s festival, and to keep up to date on the plans for next year’s, visit the Phoenix Film Festival website.
Best Film: Boys From Madrid Best Actor: Theo Pagones, Boys From Madrid Best Actress: Meredith Scott Lynn, Standing on Fishes Best Director: Carlo Gustaff, Boys from Madrid Best Supporting Actor: Phillip Maurice Hayes, Middlemen Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Kalember, Killing Cinderella Best Script: John Woodward, Vice Best Cinematography: Karl T.Hirsch, Green
Phoenix Films
Bus Stop The Gauntlet The Getaway Highway to Hell The Prophecy Raising Arizona Tank Girl Terminal Velocity Zabriskie Point
Official Festival Awards
Best Short Film: The Limited (Catherine MacKinney) and Modern Daydreams (Mitchell Rose) – tie Best Feature Film: Middlemen Best Director: Kevin Speckmaier, Middlemen Best Screenplay: Stephen Burrows, Chump Change Best Ensemble: The cast of Rollercoaster Arizona Filmmaker Award: Karl T. Hirsch, Green Audience Ballot Award: Chump Change Best Student Short: My Chorus (Richard Doherty)
Dir: Nam Nai Choi Star: Fan Siu Wong, Fan Mui Sang, Cheng Chuen Yam, Yukari Oshima
“Ricky is sent to prison. In the jail, he sees the prisoners being exploited and tortured by chief warden Cobra. Ricky decides to stand up against them. After many setbacks, Ricky gets the support of the other prisoners…” — DVD synopsis
It is perhaps fitting that a film such as this, should come with a synopsis which is wildly inaccurate in just about every way e.g. the chief warden doesn’t so much as appear until more than fifty minutes in. And it also curiously underplays things: as you’ll see, describing what happens to Ricky as “minor setbacks” is one of the greatest understatements of all time. The film is based on the 12-volume Riki-Oh manga by Tetsuya Saruwatari and Takajo Masuhiko, and also spawned two anime OAVs. But it is in this live-action incarnation that it has become most infamous, largely because it may well be the second-goriest movie ever, surpassed only by Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead. And, after a few beers, it could also be the finest film in cinema history.
Ricky Ho (Fan Siu Wong) is sent to prison – he should know he’s in trouble as soon as the transfer bus pulls in, for the courtyard is awash with what looks like tomato juice, but probably isn’t. Such are the choice of a free economy, for as a title-card informs us: “By 2001 AD, capitalistic countries have privatised all government organisations. Prisons, like car-parks, have become franchised business…”. This may explain the lack of guards, but those that are seem not be over-taxed – one guard’s duties solely seem to consist of yelling “Go over there!” at prisoners. Ricky Ho sets off the metal-detectors but an X-ray (carried out with an cheerfully complete lack of safety precautions) reveals he carries five bullets in his chest.
Elsewhere Samuel is bullying an elderly prisoner, Ma. Cue the first appearance of the Chorus – a group of inmates whose role is to forward the plot without getting in the way:
“Samuel is at it again.” “He’s a gang leader, and the captain of his cell-block.” “He’s friends with the guards.” “Well, what can you do…”
Before they, as one, turn to urinate. Such apathy extends to the staff too – “He fell and whined like a pig. What a nuisance!”, says a guard on seeing the results of Ma’s nose meeting DIY equipment. But Ricky won’t stand for this, and trips Samuel, who falls face-first onto spikes – it feels more like a public service announcement warning against the dangers of leaving large pieces of nailed wood carelessly around the bathroom.
Samuel hires the uber-fat Zorro to kill Ricky, for 30lbs of rice. He doesn’t, though the neat wound Ricky inflicts on him bears no resemblance to the torso-wide gash seen in the next shot. “Another move and I’ll…hit you!” says a guard, not exactly causing Ricky to quake in terror, as he encounters the head of the North Cell, Oscar. While locked in his cell, we get a flashback to Ricky’s training. This was from his uncle Shan Kuei, in a cemetery with the gravestones as fodder for smashing – the families of the buried must have been a bit miffed at this. Ricky makes for an entirely unconvincing student, in collar, tie and preppy look, even if the training causes his body to glow like a poster child for Chernobyl.
Back in jail, we meet the assistant warden. He keeps porno vids on the shelf in his office, and has a glass eye, which he keeps in a water glass. Oh, and he keeps mints inside the eye. While on the missing body-part front, he also has a hook for his hand, which acts both as a fork and a tool to drag dead prisoners away, so I hope he washes it between times. And it spikes Ricky when he won’t talk, but he won’t rise to the bait, so the assistant warden hands him to Oscar for a duel. Oscar blinds our hero with powdered glass and slices up his tendons but Ricky is so tough, he just ties them up himself, in a move not found in my First Aid manual. His opponent is no less tough: in a last-ditch move, he commits seppuku, and tries to use his own intestines to strangle Ricky; one bone-crunching punch (as seen in The Street Fighter) settles his hash for good. The other block heads turn up: West Cell’s Rogan (Oshima), East Cell’s Tarzan, and South Cell’s Brendan. Ricky discovers they’re growing poppies for opium in the jail, so sets fire to the crop, bringing down the wrath of Rogan. This time, he is caught by being buried in concrete – is that what they mean by a hardened criminal?
The real warden returns: he’s even tougher than his assistant, gouging out a prisoner’s eye for unrolling a red carpet badly, and is especially keen to see Ricky punished. Tarzan charges through the cell wall and goes to work on Ricky, but three punches make his elbow, jaw and hand explode, Fist of the North Star style. Time for Plan B: the roof starts to descend. Tarzan, abandoned by his mentors, assists Ricky to escape, at the cost of his own life – the lack of “squish” here is about the only moment of restraint in the entire film. Ricky falls through a trapdoor instead, and is buried alive for a week underground; it barely bothers him, even when Rogan uses some dismembered dog to block the breathing tube. There’s a flashback to why Ricky is in prison; it’s not important. Ricky’s next torture is having razor-blades crammed into his mouth, before Rogan beats him across the face, till the blades poke through his cheeks. His reaction? Spray a mouthful of blood and flesh into the warden’s face.
You can only push a man so far, and when the guy who brings Ricky food is slaughtered, it’s time to break out, using the old “hanging from the ceiling” ploy. There’s an excellent one-punch skull liquidation, and the assistant warden continues to lose body parts carelessly – first an eye, with an arm following shortly thereafter. The warden is busy grinding up the arm of a prisoner who complained about the food, when Ricky bursts in. After disposing of Rogan (though he doesn’t actually kill her…er, him), he has to take on the big boss, for after all: “The warden of any prison has to be the very best in kung-fu.” It helps that he turns, for no readily-apparent reason, into the Incredible Hulk, with much shirt ripping and crap hair – just orange rather than green. Even Ricky driving an entire arm through his stomach doesn’t slow him down. It’s only when he gets an up-close-and-personal look at the meat grinder, that justice prevails. With one punch, Ricky takes down the prison wall. “You’re all free now!”, he says, begging the question – why the hell didn’t he do that the day he arrived?
Ricky: minute-by-minute
Listing all the violence in the film would take far too long, but here are the highlights…
7:40
Carpentry plane to the face
8:17
Spiked wood through hand, into face
15:03
Zorro opens up…
15:43
…and Samuel does the same
30:58
Really big bread-knife to head
34:21
“You’ve got a lot of guts, Oscar”
37:32
The exploding head scene
43:48
Alan loses face – and the rest of his skin
59:26
Tarzan goes to pieces
72:45
Ricky gets the point(s)
75:50
A stoolie loses his head
77:19
Ricky makes a hole-in-one
78:29
Don’t complain about the food
79:39
Just one, wafer-thin mint?
84:50
The warden goes for a spin.
Footnotes:
Fan Siu Wong and Fan Mui Sang are a father-son combination – the former plays Ricky, while I think the latter is either the guy who trains him or the warden.
Yukari Oshima’s turn as Rogan is bizarre but effective. She’s probably the only name in the film familiar to most Western viewers, given her role in films like Angel and The Outlaw Brothers, so seeing her playing a man is something of a shock!
he DVD has both dub and subtitled versions; the above is based on the former, but the latter offers entirely new possibilities for amusement. All the characters have different names – “Zorro” is known as “Silly Lung”, which is hardly more appropriate – and there are any number of phrases to make you go, “Eh?”:
“Captain, we haven’t brushed our teeth yet.” “Use them as brushes.”
“You’ve even broken my sinus.”
“Ma’s hanging himself to death!”
“Your original name was Rick. But you were strong as a bull at 7 or 8 so I called you Ricky.”
Supernatural forces do not want me to review these movies. In the first three minutes, Emily (my step-daughter) came in to show me some Christmas cards, my mother-in-law asked for my help with a recalcitrant water-tap, and Emily then required help in taking her medicine. Given that she is the ultimate actress, capable not just of making a drama out of any crisis, but a three-part miniseries, this was quite a performance, involving weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth appropriate to the end of the world — and that was just me. I came back to find the power cord of my PC mysteriously unplugged. Is this the work of God or the Devil? And were they trying to stop me writing, or merely trying to protect me from a needlessly painful experience?
I’m actually a big fan of religious apocalypse movies, which is a bit of a surprise since I’m certainly no fan of the church – indeed, any church. But the Book of Revelations is a fabulous piece of writing, even if you do have to wonder what the author was on when he wrote it – odds are it was significantly stronger than holy water. If it truly is the word of God, then God must be Timothy Leary. Movies like The Seventh Sign and The Rapture serve to demonstrate that religion is no bar to interesting and thought-provoking cinema, and if Paul Verhoeven ever gets the chance to make his long-planned film on the real life of Christ, I’ll be there for it too. That was originally scheduled to be released this year, but he did Hollow Man instead; perhaps he was thinking he’d signed up for Holy Man…
Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, from an Incredibly Bad point of view – most of them fall short of this level of competence, perhaps because they are intended for true believers, rather than sceptics. They take the presence of God as a given, and thus the actions of characters which result from this faith, is usually completely inexplicable by secular standards. I’m pretty much with Sam Goldwyn with regard to the topic of messages in movies – if I want one, I’ll call Western Union – but in the case of religious films, I’m prepared to occasionally make an exception. Here are two samples, one bad, one good…
The Left Behind books are a publishing phenomena – the latest volume in the series sold 2.3 million in the first week, and the series as a whole is around 15 million. There’s clearly a market for this kind of thing, and it was perhaps inevitable that they would move across into the modern-day Sodom of Hollywood. The production company, Cloud Ten, have previously made a number of Christian-themed movies, with titles such as Tribulation, starring Gary Busey, but Left Behind is easily their biggest production, even at a moderate budget of around $17m. They’ve adopted a somewhat strange technique to promote its theatrical release – put it out on video first, in the hope of building word-of-mouth in advance of its February arrival in cinemas. This explains why there were two money-off coupons in the box. However, I should point out that the last movie with such a religion-inspired campaign was Battlefield Earth.
Left Behind begins in the expectedly po-faced style; even the logo is preachy, depicting a child hesitating before a road which goes in two directions. A man takes the kid’s hand and leads it along the right-hand path, while lighting flashes ominously over the other. Add in an opening voice-over including lines like “We should have known better. But we didn’t…In the end, there’s no denying the truth” and the pious tone is set.
The film proper starts with a surprise Arab attack on Israel, where journalist Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron) is interviewing a scientist in the middle of a wheat field. They take shelter in a nearby village which just happens to conceal the Israeli base of operations – yeah, like they’d really let a random Yankee journo in there without asking any questions – but the Arab planes are smote (smited? smut? smeet?) mysteriously from the sky to the bafflement of everyone. Or, at least, everyone who hasn’t read the video sleeve. Buck sends footage back to his company, beaming his hi-definition – albeit looking suspiciously like 35mm film – footage to his network using a dish the size of a cake-tin, manually perched on a dustbin, as a satellite uplink. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Williams gets a hot tip on the whole smiting thing from paranoid conspiracist Dirk Burton, who blames industrialists Cothran and Stonagal. Initially dismissing the claims as the rantings of a paranoid conspiracist, Williams is forced to re-evaluate them after Burton’s predictions come true (gasp!). So, it’s accurate rantings of a paranoid conspiracist then… At this point, the Rapture occurs, though it’s not until 74 mins in that anyone mentions the R word, which is weird in a supposedly religious movie. For those unfamiliar with Biblical eschatology: the Rapture is when the truest believers are swept up to heaven, thereby avoiding the Tribulation, a rather nasty period on Earth before the second coming.
Williams is on a plane when “dozens” of passengers vanish; this is pretty dodgy from a statistical point of view. The Bible is obscure on many things, but it’s damn clear about the number that get raptured: “and no man could learn that song but the hundred [and] forty [and] four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth” [Revelations 14:3]. That may seem like a lot, but it’s barely 0.01% of the Christians on Earth, so the odds are heavily against even a single person being raptured off a Jumbo. Perhaps a package tour of Israeli monks was on board, since the Bible also says those Raptured must be virginal Jews [Revelations 7:4 and 14:4], points strangely ignored here. The film at one stage claims 144 million have vanished i.e. the Bible is out by a factor of a thousand. Suddenly, the Feeding of the, er, Five doesn’t seem so impressive.
Back on the plane, the carefully-considered response of pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) to this catastrophe is…to drop the oxygen masks. This has a strange calming effect on the passengers – maybe they should try it on the ground, where the Soviet leader of the UN, Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), a pawn of Cothran and Stonagal, takes the reins over the panicking world populace. Steele and Williams team up: Steele’s wife and son have been raptured (repeat previous statistical discussion about how unlikely this is, and never mind the bit about being a virginal Jew), leading to a pitiful scene as he sobs over their belongings, though the most pitiful thing about it is the over-acting on view. Blaming his wife’s religious beliefs, he hurls a bible at the mirror. but then, of course, starts reading it…
Williams finds Dirk Smith murdered (yes, I know he was Dirk Burton earlier in the film, but the computer screen definitely says Dirk Smith – his email address is dirk@isdn.com, if you want to send him some), and is shot at himself while examining computer files. Meanwhile the newly-born again Steele links up with the local priest, helping the latter to refind his faith. I drift on the edge of finding sleep, since it’s painfully obvious where this is all heading. When Chloe gets down her “Teen Devotional Bible” and starts reading it, my worst fears are confirmed – this is truly the stuff of nightmares, albeit perhaps not in the way that the makers intended.
Williams and Steele discover that Burton had decoded the prophecies in the Bible, revealing the Cothran-Stenagal plan. Williams gets into the UN, helped by a former air-hostess whom Steele had been screwing – obviously, before he found God and stopped doing that kind of thing. He reveals the conspiracy to Carpathia, and even turns to prayer. But, oops, Carpathia is the Anti-Christ: all lit from below (right) and with his Russian accent becoming thicker by the syllable. He shoots Cothran and Stenagal and takes over the world, simple as that. It’s a really weird and downbeat climax, despite a desperate attempt to make the ending uplifting, with a closing voice-over which goes, “Our only hope is to join together and trust God. I don’t have all the answers; but for now, faith is enough.” It doesn’t work. I know there’s another half-dozen books to go, but the impact on someone like me who hasn’t read the series, is that Satan has won, and God hates everyone, especially Christians – I don’t think this was the desired effect, but I confess to finding it oddly gratifying…
The Omega Code
Dir: Rob Marcarelli Star: Casper Van Dien, Michael York, Catherine Oxenberg, Michael Ironside.
This didn’t exactly start in the most promising of ways: the DVD mis-spelled the leading man’s name on his bio, it’s a production of ‘Good Times Entertainment’ (wince), preceded by a trailer for CrossWalk.com – “the intersection of faith and life” – and the first scene (once again, in Jerusalem) has Michael Ironside looking utterly mortified, disguised as a Hassidic Jew assassin complete with hat and extremely fake beard. Meanwhile, motivational speaker Dr. Lane (Van Dien) gets the exposition out of the way on a TV show hosted by Cassandra Barris (Oxenberg). A code hidden in the Torah predicts the future – as well as, incidentally, Princess Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel. Guess God had a bit of space to fill at the bottom of a page. I presume Lane is supposed to be immensely irritating, like all motivational speakers, coming out with phrases like “we are the higher power,” early signs that he’ll undergo a conversion somewhere between here and Damascus.
Elsewhere, in a laboratory populated with whizzy graphics work-stations, some Russian-sounding dudes are decoding the Torah and coming up with convenient one-sentence summaries which punctuate much of the film like intertitles from the silent era. Stone Alexander (Michael York), a “media mogul turned political dynamo” is now leader of the European Union. Lane wants to speak to him, but is dissuaded by Stone’s personal assistant/bodyguard/part-time Hassidic hit-man Dominic (Ironside). Instead, he has a vision in which one of Alexander’s horses goes all glowy-eyed and berserk. This is just one in a series: as someone asks him, “What kind of visions?”, to which the reply is, “I dunno – weird ones.”. He’s undergoing a divorce, and given his separated and whiny wife, it’s no surprise his small daughter appears to have picked up the Immensely Irritating gene.
The Russians take action to make sure their latest decryption comes true. In another strange echo of Left Behind, a reporter is conveniently right on the scene for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, as the Dome on the Rock in Jerusalem (or a 1/12-scale model thereof) blows up. Lane assists Alexander’s efforts to keep the peace; “We need an archetypal figure to embody the message,” he says, and signs up as Alexander’s Minister of Information. Alexander proposes a global currency (another common cornerstone of the apocalyptic brigade, tying in with bar-codes as the Mark of the Beast), and Lane is contacted by a defector from the decryption program. Memo to self: if I ever become the Anti-Christ, instruct staff to shoot traitors before they hand over incriminating sheets of paper to my enemies, not just after.
From this point, you can pretty much tick off the Common or Garden Interpretations of Revelations: a seven-year peace treaty between Israel and Arabs; the rebuilding of King Solomon’s temple; miracle food and water technology from Alexander; a global government under ten heads. Skip forward three years, and Lane is still having visions, though he’s not mentioned them to anyone in the meantime. He discovers Alexander’s plotting, as he and Dominic prepare to initiate Phase 2. The latter is miffed to discover Lane is slated as the prophet for Alexander’s vision and tries in a fit of whiny pique to shoot Lane; Alexander takes the bullet, but Lane is blamed for the assassination and is forced on the run. However, Alexander comes back to life, to everyone’s surprise – not least, Dominic’s…
This is where the movie really kicks in; you’re used to seeing Michael Ironside as a bad guy, but Michael York as the Anti-Christ is so delightfully against type that it works completely, and is huge fun. Plagued by voices, “painful yet sweet”, he takes over as world leader. Lane links up with two prophets who have been causing trouble, and tries to spread the not-so-good word about Alexander, but is blocked at every turn. His helpful prophets give him the final code, which Cassandra steals from him – yes, Catherine Oxenburg is evil too! Is nothing sacred? As she says, “Even Satan comes as an angel of light.”
After Alexander’s coronation, he goes totally out into left field: “I have become king and God,” he says, which doesn’t go over very well. Oblivious, he shoots the prophets, following up with, “I want these reprobates put on display. And guarded.” This seems a little excessive, given they’re dead, but in this film, the scythe-wielder is more Slightly Inconvenient Reaper than anywhere near Grim, so you can see his point. Other omens start cropping up, and it turns out the code Lane got wasn’t the proper one. As digital planes fly overhead on their way to a nuclear strike, Lane has another vision, and finds that prayer makes the gates to his cell fly open. The prophets are indeed resurrected – score one for the Anti-Christ – and take their wrath on Dominic. Lane tries to shoot Alexander, but is forced to surrender the final code…
Which is where I’ll stop, less for fear of spoiling the end, more because I wouldn’t be prepared to swear to the veracity of my vision. Watching this on New Year’s Day 2001, the only thing I could think of was, “My God, it’s full of stars.” It certainly is an ending, but precisely what it means is something I leave to you. Still, it’s a damn sight better than Left Behind, on a number of levels. Firstly, and most importantly, the religious stuff is actually kept well in the background; the hero never really converts as I expected, and the writers eschew over-zealous attachment to the Bible. If it doesn’t fit in, it gets dumped – there is no mention of the Rapture at all, and it’s much more self-contained, whizzing through the entire Apocalypse in 100 minutes. The presence of decent actors like York and Ironside is an undeniable plus too, and overall, this is not a religious film. Nor is it even really a film about religion, because Christianity is never allowed to get in the way of entertainment, and that realisation by the producers may have been the most important code to crack of all.
It proved a surprising success at the box-office, despite only having a few hundred prints to cover all the cinemas. Opening the same week as Fight Club, The Omega Code grossed more per screen, and also outlasted Messrs. Pitt and Norton, inhabiting the top twenty for seven weeks to gross a respectable $12.6m. As a result of this success, a sequel, Megiddo, is now in post-production, and is due to open in autumn 2001. York and Ironside return, and are joined by cult heroes Udo Kier, Michael Biehn and Franco Nero. With Brian Trenchard-Smith (Leprechaun 4: In Space) directing, it’s safe to say that Incredibly Bad Film Show correspondents are keenly awaiting its arrival…
In the blue corner, out of the (then) colony of Hong Kong, we have The Heroic Trio, reigning three-babe tag-team champions, and queens of femme fatale cinema: Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. In the red corner, weighing in at between one and twelve million dollars per movie, we have the challengers, Charlie’s Angels, employed by a guy they’ve never met: Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. But which of these two teams of action heroines would win in a fight? It’s over to our commentator at ringside for the best of the brawlin’ broad action…
Anita Mui vs. Lucy Liu.
Anita Mui is sometimes known as The Madonna of Asia, but let’s not hold that against her, since they look totally different, and Mui can act. This pits two former Jackie Chan associates against each other, Mui from Drunken Master 2 and Liu from Shanghai Noon. Both are well-known for playing somewhat angst-ridden characters, but Liu gets the edge because of a somewhat disturbing fondness for playing dominatrixes, both in Payback and an odd sequence in CA where she does an S/M efficiency queen. Mui may have had the glorious multiple machine-gun moment in A Better Tomorrow III, but in a bare-knuckle bout, Liu would soon clean up. Winner: Lucy Liu.
Maggie Cheung vs. Cameron Diaz.
Here we have the permanently perky little misses, Cheung and Diaz. The latter won the biggest pay-day for CA (a reputed $12m), while Cheung’s recent career has tended to vanish up its own art-house, with fodder like Chinese Box and the execrably self-indulgent Irma Vep. However, with her back-catalog including such gems as Flying Dagger, that’s a lot of class for Diaz to handle. This is especially true, since her career has been made, largely in “zany” comedies like There’s Something About Mary, though her experiences there with hair-gel mean Cheung will be aiming to keep her at a distance. To her credit, she did look the most competent fighter in CA, and if there’s a rematch in the sequel, this one could go the other way. Winner: Maggie Cheung.
Michelle Yeoh vs. Drew Barrymore.
The luck of the random draw pits the two leaders against each other, in a battle which will decide the fate of the title. And it’s a tough one to call. Both bounced back from down-time in the middle of their careers: Yeoh was married to magnate Dickson Poon, while Barrymore could be found wedded to drugs and booze. There’s no doubt both are on the way up – Barrymore’s role as a CA producer has her power quotient upped, while Yeoh might just be looking at Oscar nominations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, after stealing Tomorrow Never Dies. By the time this one was over, both contestants would be battered and bruised. But that’s something the utterly hardcore Yeoh is used to by now, so she gains the victory on points. Winner: Michelle Yeoh.
So, by a split decision, the title remains in the Far East, with The Heroic Trio holding onto the belt, despite the strongest challenge to come from the West since they took the title off the Thelma and Louise squad (Davis, Sarandon and Khouri) in a 1992 barbed-wire cage death match.
Dir: Lorenzo Doumani Star: Katherine Heigl, David Lipper, Meredith Salenger, Randy Quaid.
“Let’s get ready to bumble!”
Killer insects have been responsible for some classically bad movies in the past: the entire killer-bee genre, for example, or J.P.Simon’s extraordinary Slugs, which took a Shaun Hutson novel and removed all the artistic qualities therein. Bug Buster operates in a similar way, except without a source novel to plunder, so resorts to scenery-chewing and not one, but two, actors who’ve never done anything outside the starship Enterprise: George Takei and James Doohan. But like many bad movies, there is a saving grace, and in this case, it comes in the form of Randy Quaid. He plays General George, a pest eliminator – or, as his ultracheap TV adverts put it, “elimina-torrrrrrr” – who is lurking in the background for the first two-thirds of the film, foreshadowing events with a glorious mix of machismo and bullshit. His commercials alone are enough to keep you watching.
This is fortunate, since the rest of the film doesn’t have much on this front, beyond poor Katherine Heigl going through more insectoid torture than most fledgling actresses should have to. She plays Shannon, who has been having nightmares involving giant cockroaches crawling over her skin – and let me put it this way, I couldn’t see any CGI being used. While not quite up to the standard of infamous Hong Kong nasty, Centipede Horror, you still have to take your hat off to her. Such are the traumas that have to be endured when you are in a movie with a monster which is not in the slightest big threatening or dangerous; the “Ick!” factor must be upped instead, and Heigl is the unfortunate heroine.
Anyway, she and her family (including another has-been from television, Bernie Koppel from The Love Boat) buy a hotel, and move into the sleepy California town of Mountview. At least, it was sleepy, until Steve (David Lipper) and Veronica (Meredith Salenger) go for a dip in the local lake, despite “the old wives’ tales about people getting their legs gnawed off in the water”. And, lo, before you can say “Wasn’t she in Lake Placid?”, Veronica has duly been nibbled by something slimy, and I don’t mean Steve. The local sheriff (Doohan) closes the lake with admirable promptness – as he says, “You saw ‘Jaws’, didn’t you?” – until he shoots a “scarfish”. The local vet, who moonlights as the local doctor, local forensic pathologist and, for all I know, local priest, helpfully informs him it’s a fish out of its water, and also has a giant cockroach in its stomach.
Realising this is not 100% normal, she calls her old teacher, Professor Fujimoto (Takei, shown right). He gives a new meaning to the old saw about “phoning his lines in”, since he never appears in a scene with any of the other characters, only talking to them on the telephone. Back at Shannon’s hotel, the lounge act have turned up; charmingly named ‘Trailer Park Trash’, their set is interrupted by the sudden, roach-related death of their sax player (played by cult movie guru Johnny Legend). Shannon is so upset, she…goes to see Fall of the House of Usher with Steve. As you do. But by an amazing coincidence, two audience members also suddenly go icky in an insect style – what are the odds against that? Cue an amusing cameo from MTV-jockette ‘Downtown’ Julie Brown as rabid reporter Katie Cunning of FU2 news, who is immensely irritating, yet is equally spot-on the mark, as a caricature of immensely irritating local news reporters.
“I can’t help wondering if there’s any connection between the roach I found in the fish, and the ones I found in the humans,” says our local vet/pathologist/whatever. Well, duh! Shannon continues her unusual therapy for her traumatic experiences by…taking the world’s bubbliest bath, watched by the town loonie, though her only reaction is to grab propane curling-tongs. Before you know it, she’s taking a shower too, in preparation for her next date with Steve – hey, why let a few deaths get in the way of your social life? Although in mitigation, if I had to let bugs crawl over me for the sake of art, you’d not get me off the soap for months. Veronica cunningly distracts Steve by having her leg go all septic (the one nibbled in the lake; it seems like a lifetime ago, but is really only three beers) and the unfeeling bitch then goes and dies on him. Sheesh.
Bugs are now pretty much everywhere: Veronica starts hatching, Shannon’s nightmares come true, though the insects attacking her are vacuumed up by Steve [as an aside, I’ve done this myself in New York – it’s about the only way to get rid of the roaches there], and her parents are ambushed while making love. Cue Katie Cunning again, though her horror is as nothing compared to the viewer’s, at having watched The Love Boat‘s doctor have a shag. “This whole thing has gotten way out of hand,” says a deputy, but I don’t think he’s referring to the movie in general. However, there’s only one man who can help…
“He was a war hero in Vietnam.” “What did he do?” “He survived…”
As the man himself says, “When General George opens up his can of whup-ass, there’ll be roaches in Siberia feeling the heat…” Associating with the General is nothing if not educational: “They appear to be amphibious…that means they can live in water and on dry land.” On the other hand, I wouldn’t put too much reliance on his scientific accuracy; five minutes later it’s, “Vampire bat: its bite’s deadlier than a king cobra…kill you like that…” Minor details like there not being vampire bats in California, and their bite not being poisonous anyway, don’t get in the way. But pseudo-science and cliche is this film’s stock-in-trade, as the following exchange shows:
“So you’re saying that once they get inside the body, they spontaneously lay larvae which destroy human tissue as they multiply at hyperaccelerated rates?” “That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
Things gallop cheerfully on to the inevitable conclusion in the roach lair – an old mineshaft, should you care about such things – which sees Oscar-nominee Quaid (1973’s The Last Detail) rolling around on the floor, engaging in a fist-fight with a papier-mache insect. Difficult to say whether he or Heigl were the most humiliated in making this film. There’s a Scooby-Doo moment, in which Scotty proves that ye canna change the laws of physics (ok, he doesn’t, but I always wanted to write that) before the obligatory ending that isn’t, leaving scope, more in hope than anything else I suspect, for Bug Buster 2. In your dreams, Doumani.
This is shallow, laughable and badly-written. There’s no doubt about that. But in its defence, it never stops moving, with something always going on. Heigl is cute and personable, and any producers reading this should also note she is clearly willing to do anything for a role… Randy Quaid is quite magnificent, and it’s a shame that he only turns up properly for the last third of the film, as he sets things ablaze and the character could easily sustain an entire movie. The effects are pretty decent, even if there’s some confusion over the difference between “cockroaches” and “millipedes”…hey, they’re all bugs. Mindless, gloopy and passable fun, if taken with the prescribed dose of alcohol.
At the risk of sounding like a mini-megalomaniac – which, the nurses say, is way down my list of disorders – there are occasionally times when, just for a moment, it seems as if the universe truly does revolve around me. I mean, within three months of my arrival in Phoenix, they’ve organised a film-festival. And not just any film-festival, but one dedicated to low-budget and independent movies, with nothing costing more than a million allowed on the premises. Does life get any better than that? Not when we get two all-access press passes to the event, no.
In addition to the independence of vision, low-budget movies offer another advantage: they’re short. Of the seventeen films in the festival, the longest ran for just 101 minutes, because when you’ve got no money, every frame has to count. These are like blow-darts, make the point and stop, unlike the overblown epics coming out of Hollywood. There, you might as well smash the rock over the viewers’ heads a few more times because it’s someone else’s money anyway.
The event took place in a far-off corner of the 24-screen AMC megaplex in downtown Phoenix; if this smacked of sell-out to The Man, at least we got comfortable stadium seating with lots of leg-room for our souls, and it was a salutory experience to walk past the likes of Saving Silverman on the way to the festival zone. Once there, it was like entering another country because, as well as the content, the atmosphere was great. Most entries had directors, producers and actors in attendance, who were delighted to talk about their work afterwards, in sessions of excellent informality. Everyone was approachable and friendly, and additionally, a lot of guests hung around to see other people’s movies, a major plus compared to other festivals I’ve attended.
On the down side, an unfortunate number of screenings were plagued with technical problems: the video projection was particularly awful, with bad colour and shortcomings on sound – where there was any at all – but even some of the film projection was not up to an acceptable standard. These gremlins led to films starting anywhere up to half-an-hour late, and this had a knock-on effect, delaying both later movies in that screen, and in other screens since people might have tickets to them as well. At $10/film, it was pricey, especially for the video-projected films (a fact not mentioned in the program!) and the ticketing system itself seemed strange. If you bought a ticket to a specific movie, you (theoretically) might or might not get in, since priority was given to those who’d bought one-day passes.
