Post by No Personality on May 10, 2010 7:47:21 GMT -5
So, I would say "the debate rages on" about which Larry Cohen movie is the worst of his very intriguing and somewhat short-lived directorial career (he's still alive, he just stopped directing in the mid-90's and didn't go back until 2005's Masters of Horror, and then stopped again and hasn't gone back since)... Some people think it's It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (certainly not I, that film is pretty clearly superior to 1978's It Lives Again). Some (including me) think it's Full Moon High (I'm not kidding, that thing is so bad- it's beyond incoherent) ...But it seems the majority are pretty convinced it's this 1989 Hollywood misfire. Obviously because they haven't seen Full Moon High. I only caught it thanks to Comcast On Demand and I thank them because now I know not to even think about buying a DVD should one ever surface in the future.
Wicked Stepmother and I go back a long way. I saw it on TV, we had the VHS, and now I have Amazon.com's exclusive DVD-R edition of the movie. In case you might be wondering, the picture quality on that DVD-R leaves quite a bit to be desired. Even on a regular TV (this will look like hell on something wide and trying this on HD will give you a headache), the image is way too soft in every way. It's widescreen, although Amazon.com the site make no bones about the fact that it's letterboxed. I suspect in fact, they just stuck the fullscreen inside a box with bars cutting off large portions of the top and bottom of almost every shot. And thanks to the fact that there is nothing on the DVD in terms of subtitles or captions, I don't know how to say the following properly: when Paracles the cat first appears, you can barely see her because the bottom bar cuts off almost everything.
To make matters worse, there is no menu to speak of, there's no trailer (although one appears on the Amazon.com page for the DVD (so you can watch it online for a limited time - FUCK "for a limited time", I wanted it to keep!), the back of the case tells you the image is in fullscreen, and if you can coach yourself into watching this on an actual wide-screen it comes up with huge bars on the sides as well as the top and bottom (it looks like they want you to believe the movie is 2.35:1 but on most TV's it comes out looking 1.85:1) - there's no way this is anamorphic. However on the plus side: I can't complain at all about the case artwork, the audio is a noticeable stereo (though they didn't really enhance it in any way) and comes out better than the image quality, and there is a healthy selection of chapters. Of course, that's just because they programmed it to create one every 5 minutes.
I haven't watched the VHS in about 6 years now (and now I'm afraid to because I don't want to know how much better that looks than this), so I can't say for sure that the bars cut off a lot but it looks like they do. But yeah, I've actually seen this movie quite a few times where perhaps most people wouldn't get through the first 10 minutes. And I liked it as a kid (hey, what do most kids know anyway?). The only reason any critics ever decided to check it out, knowing its' reputation (IMDb.com - this is one of the only times I find it appropriate to mention what "they" think - currently has it rated 2.7 out of 10 and I don't see that figure rising anytime soon), was because it was the very last film Bette Davis ever starred in (she died very shortly afterward). Even classic-film aficionados are likely to gag during this just because Davis is wearing a fairly sickly-looking wig and can barely rasp-out a single sentence professionally.
Let's face it, all the great ones have to die. That's what makes them great in a way. The AFI community sure loves to do those classy retrospective specials of the old glory days of Hollywood, featuring the black and white megastars of stage and screen. I don't know what Davis's career was like in the 60's and prior to that but my entire introduction to her was in the stuff she did from the 70's onward. When basically, she turned Joan Crawford and would do almost any part she was offered. Such as the 1976 haunted house horror-drama, Burnt Offerings. But this comedown did have a bright spot. She turned up in a pair of spooky Disney films (when previously I believe the only horror film Davis ever did was the 1962 Davis-vs-Crawford epic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the first in a long line of "hag horror" films, which Stepmother lovingly recalls)- Return to Witch Mountain and Watcher in the Woods.
It's kind of sad that Hag Horror had to die. It completely killed the witch movie (with either this or Anjelica Huston's ultimate diva turn as the Grand High Witch in 1990's very family-oriented The Witches, where she sauntered around and flared her eyes every bit as passionately-cold as Annie Lennox). In fact, the last great hag used in a horrific and entertainingly over-the-top context was probably Tracey Ullman as "Latrine" in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights (though she was in her 30's and still beautiful, she was caked in great Nasty makeup). After that, to say the last, witches became passe and old-fashioned. I'm guessing most people think P.C. culture has something to do with that. I usually scoff at most folks who piss and moan about how evil P.C. and liberalism was to the 90's. The worst those ever did was turn a few dozen into the "here's the life-affirming, rocky, dramatic story of my life" sobber, occasionally, on YouTube. Which is reserved anyway for the Coming Out vid. So it hardly destroyed the world.
Though, honestly, there was a lot of commotion for years about women as villains which reared its' head in the 90's I'm sure. When the witches basically disappeared or stopped being profitable in Hollywood (long time ago, actually, save for the rare Disney film such as The Little Mermaid, Disney's last true witch movie), along came the cold hearted bitch character, as mastered by the great Glenn Close in a large range of films starting with 1987's Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons and just full-steam-aheading into the 90's with Disney's 101 Dalmatians (the live-action version), Mary Reilly, and Cookie's Fortune. Attraction started the trend of the modern erotic thriller and then women got even nastier in the 90's with the bi-sexual mindfucker in Basic Instinct, the hook-wielding identity thief in Single White Female, the corporate rapist in Disclosure, and the ultimate evil woman of The Last Seduction.
This trend left no room for a traditional wicked witch. But then, who would play one? The last true star of Hag Horror was Shelley Winters and in the 90's, she hitched onto Roseanne. Which is my cue to mention Halloween and TV shows, where they comine. That's the last place you'll see another fun witch (Stuart Gordon tried to bring witches back with the abysmal Dreams in the Witch House in 2005 for Masters of Horror and Argento in 2007 with Mother of Tears but these works are conflicted by survival "horror" trends and torture flick imagery that's been polluting the genre for the last decade). And then, you'll never get passed the fact that it's just Roseanne or Patricia Richardson dressed in a costume because they're still pushing the main storyline along. P.C. is not to blame. If anything, it's that the commercialistic 80's used everything up. I don't resent the 80's for that because it was a lot of fun back then. I still got into Halloween then (when I could ignore the alcoholics and stupid parents who always sought to ruin the holiday) because I was a kid.
And as I kid, I was blissfully unaware of cheesiness. Of which, Stepmother has so much that it could open a factory. I can see it now: Bette Davis and the Cheese Factory. Because I know I'm the only here who's seen the movie, I'll lay down a few plot pieces. The movie's star may be Davis, but the main characters are "Jenny" - Colleen Camp (Valley Girl) - and "Steve" - David Rasche (Sledge-Hammer). The two are upper-middle class suburban vegetarian yuppies who go on a tropical vacation only to come back to their home and find that Jenny's father (who lives with them) has just been married and moved-in his new wife, the slinky and leisurely-devious Miranda (Davis, naturally), a chainsmoking meat-eater who begins dismantling their home and entire lives piece by piece. Things are further shaken up when Miranda's seductive, busty daughter Priscilla (Barbara Carrera) moves in and the two try to hide their cat Paracles from the family because Jenny is horribly alergic to cats.
Surprisingly, the movie's filming wasn't disrupted by the death of Bette Davis. She simply walked off the movie. Originally, she had a bigger part and- hell, there may not even have been a daughter Priscilla in the original screenplay. Davis or her agent agreed that she would do the movie but all throughout her couple weeks of shooting, she complained and was not happy. It's said that she hated the script and wanted it changed. They eventually made changes knowing that Bette didn't want to do the rest of the movie. So eventually, she disappears altogether and the rest of the witchy work is done by Barbara Carerra. Cohen says on the Masters of Horror DVD (set) that she had to leave the project because her teeth were damaged and it took 2 weeks to have them fixed. So the studio (MGM, which I'll mention again before this is over) decided it was best to pull the plug then. Cohen convinced them to allow him to finish the movie by bringing up video rentals. He simply told them they could sell it in a "Bette Davis Collection" package.
And he was right because my Mom was a video collector back then and was buying up Bette Davis and John Wayne movies on VHS from phone-in and TV-order catalogs. This was one of the videos she bought early. The movie's failure could be blamed on a lot things. Colleen Camp is a good place to start. Now, I believe she's got talent (just watch Valley Girl and Election for proof). And she was part of Francis Ford Coppola's company of actors and filmmakers. Yeah, that's right- the guy who made those (I say: awful) Godfather movies. But as an actress, she has almost no range. She can deliver key peaks well but she can't give us the things in-between to connect them together believably. She lacks nuance. And so, she comes off unintentionally haggy herself. Overbearing, deeply throated, and hasty. She was not meant to carry on a lead role. And I believe this is the only time she ever tried.
Carrera is much more successful, at first, as the mysterious other woman who pops up mysterious-ly and seeks to charm every male whose path she crosses. I say "at first" because this movie is basically a comedy and so, eventually, they try to make her character more comedic. That's an unfortunate error. Though it does work well in interstitial form during a very brief scene that spoofs MGM's legendary The Wizard of Oz (the studio is even referenced in the dialogue: "this is reality, not MGM!"). I can't say I'm familiar with anything else Carrera has done, but I imagine she's best at sensual roles. Shortly after she moves into the family's house, she starts campily darting about the house (in full Shelley Long, Troop Beverly Hills mode) like Whitney Houston in her "How Will I Know" music video trying to "refurnish" the house (even though I think the rooms she bitches about look stunning and perfectly charming 80's-chic) and suggesting that she will take Miranda's place to ensure Jenny's father Sam (Lionel Stander) is satisfied in the bedroom department.
Now, don't get the wrong idea here but I'm about to complain about a kid. This will, if I ever get around to re-watching such fare as Sleepless in Seattle again, become a recurring theme in many future Spotlights. Then the movie adds a kid to the mix and he's treated like a dog (when the movie already has a dog, who bites a couple people later on) whose primary function is to sniff out Bette Davis as an immediate fraud and not trust her. Shawn Donahue is a cute kid and that's why they cast him. He's an extraordinarily bad actor (aren't most kids?) and every line that comes out of his mouth is of the highest pitched, most grating monotone there is. To compound on that, they give him a chance to scream out a proclamation when he gets in a painfully bad fight scene with 2 faceless extras playing volleyball jocks (go ahead and giggle, it's alright) who have all the charsima of the bullies from a similar-feeling episode of Saved by the Bell (the season where they all go to work at Malibu Sands). "I DON'T BELIEVE WHAT I JUST DID!!" Save it for your inevitable Kids Incorporated audition, buddy.
The whole movie has that feel where nothing really goes right. But the only things I'll complain about are Donahue and the bad special effects that come into play when Carerra makes the roots of all the trees on the family's property start growing above ground. They eventually break into the house and start trying to strangle people. Oh, Larry- just stop trying to make the movie funny already. His real expertise is with horror. Oh, many college students (I believe I had a go at them in at least 2 other Spotlights) say Larry's best work was in blaxploitation in the early 70's before he broke into horror with 1973's critical-darling, It's Alive. But between the subversive Alive and the masterful Q the Winged Serpent, the guy did no wrong (oh, wait... Full Moon High was 1981). This could have been a horror movie (just look at how well 1985's goofy The Stuff worked in spite of the goofiness). With very little tweaking. And hell, Bette walked off anyway. It's not like she could stop Cohen from taking this into the outer space of insanity.
I still like the movie. It's that very special brand of 80's cheese that is relentlessly charming (to me). Just cut out a few pieces (which at 93 minutes, the movie could afford to lose anyway). I actually don't personally mind Camp (or her fake uptight-housewife prissy scowling) at all. I love Carerra a lot. I love Richard Moll's whole thing here, the bumbling detective. He's always been extremely likable since Night Court (in fact if that first season is any indication, he may be the best thing about that show)- so much so that I can't believe he never had his own movie or show. I love the glowing and sparkling effects we see throughout and I wish movies still used them. I love the music score (except for the out of place drum and cymbals) and it's billowing, cheap, floaty would-be mysticism. And I very much enjoy the slightly over-the-hill David Rasche as the short-haired father being the movie's only male sex symbol. He's actually quite hot despite only being used in comedic roles.
But what I love most about this movie, and this may be one of the reasons I've stayed a secret fan of it all these years, is the game show parody scene. As a kid, I was psycho about game shows. Used to watch them constantly. And I would marvel over the set design and props and tricks. From that awesome board of icons and the little Whammies in Press Your Luck to the enormous color spinner on Wheel of Fortune to the big cars and balloons finale of Hollywood Squares (strictly the 80's version with those electric blue and neon pink lazer X and O light panels) to all those funky (I mean "groove" funky, not blown-chunks funky) rad 70's but elaborate games on The Price is Right. I still want my own Plinko board (in full original size and with all the original colors as the show's huge-ass Plinko board). Here, they call their game show Winners & Losers and spoof Vanna White with a character called Vanilla. Played by Laurene Landon, I could do a whole Spotlight just about "keep your hands out of the money" Vanilla, she's so freaking hilarious. Imagine Vanne White as a nasty, superficial twit who macks on the winning male contestant and tries to steal money right on live national television. A hoot and a half!
