The Fate of the Furious

...But fuck all that story and character nonsense, you say, let’s get to the cars. To which I say: If I had to sit through the glycerine tears of Vin Diesel to get to the cars, so do you...

Click here for a full review of the shiny pile of noisy hackery that is The Fate of the Furious.

Spirits of the Dead

You want some serious Euro filmic decadence from the birth of the sexual revolution? Step right this way to a period piece that adapts short stories you may have read in high school...

Spirits of the Dead adapts three tales from Edgar Allan Poe and was part of the trend for anthology films than ran from the mid-60s to mid-70s, which included such highlights as Torture Garden, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (which is actually a train) and Tales of Terror (which also took Poe as its an inspiration and had Vincent Price to boot). In Spirits of the Dead, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini each adapted a short story--the title is taken from a poem. It should surprise no one that that the last contribution is the best, but each of the others has something to recommend them as well.

Opening the film is "Metzengerstein," the offering from Roger Vadim which, like pretty much any Vadim film, is a showcase for the hot blonde he was banging at the time, in this case Jane Fonda.

As decadent aristocrat the Countess Frederica, Jane looks absolutely gorgeous in an array of costumes that combine thigh boots and bared navels with slashed sleeves and ruffled collars. (I swear that John Galliano must absolutely adore this film. Whether he knows it or not.) Not to mention the hair. The hair is to die for. RuPaul and Dolly Parton would tussle over that hair... courtesy of ace Eurostylist of the 60s Carita, BTW.

Of course, all this flash--Wine! Orgies! Daggers! Corsets! Baby leopards!--doesn't conceal that pretty much nothing happens in "Metzengerstein." We watch Fonda stomp around in her outfits like Beyonce until she runs across Baron Wilhelm..

Baron Wilhelm is played by Jane's brother Peter--in the story they're supposed to be cousins, but apparently that wasn't incestuous enough for the French. He barely speaks, which is supposed to be because he's even moodier than Jane is, but I'm pretty sure it's actually because his French sucks (remember that Peter spent his teen years getting high; Jane spent hers going to Vassar and working at Paris Review).

 The showgirl headdress existed even in Medieval times...

Anyway, Jane gets pissed, sets Peter's stables on fire, Peter dies, a big black horse shows up in her tapestry and in her stables, then more shit catches on fire, etc. etc. etc...

"William Wilson" is the entry by Louis Malle, a variation on the Doppleganger story--except in this version, it's a good double that keeps thwarting the evil original. Wilson is played by Alain Delon, who projects just the right level of icily dispassionate cruelty, qualities the real Delon, a notorious asshole, apparently possessed in spades.

 

We watch William Wilson torment both his teachers and classmates, even as a child--or, should we say, attempt to, because it seems that another, identical boy named William Wilson constantly shows up to put a stop to his efforts at sadism, whether its pulling a bullied classmate out of a barrel full of rats or calling a halt to an "autopsy" on a live girl.

 

Out of the three stories, Malle comes the closest to giving the people what they (allegedly) want--creepy rats, icky autopsies, bare boobs, titillating flogging scenes--though the idea that the supposedly monstrous "other" is actually a force for good throw it off-balance a bit.. Actually, Spirits of the Dead does not have that much horror in it--there's a sort of ghost/possession in the first story and the double in the second one but the third if just sort of hallucinatory,  which we will get to in a moment...

The theoretical climax of "William Wilson" comes with Brigitte Bardot in a black wig smoking a cigar--Brigitte is great at what she does, but she's one of the last people i'd ever cast as an ersatz Lola Montez. (Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was born for to play Lola and it's amazing no one ever had her do it--imagine how much better the Ophuls Lola Montez would be with her rather than that pretty waxwork, Martine Carol. But i digress..)

Anyway, Bardot throws shade on Delon and beats him at cards, then suddenly he starts winning and winds up, quite literally winning her. He whips Brunette Brigitte, then is about to have his buddies gang bang her, when the good William Wilson shows up and reveals that bad William Wilson fucking cheated. That Wilson bullies, tortures, rapes--but suffers no real comeuppance until he cheats his cronies at cards is still appropriate to today...

Our last and most impressive entry is Fellini's "Toby Dammit," ostensibly based on Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," but only in the most tenuous fashion.

From the opening airport pan--a mass of shifting color tints, distorted soundscapes, leering faces and cardboard cutouts (no, literally, cardboard cutouts)--we know we're in Fellini territory. If 8 1/2 is the tale of the director's meltdown and La Dolce Vita is the writer's, "Toby Dammit" is the actor. with the identity crisis turning out that much worse. (If "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" are the Poe surly teen goths read, "Toby Dammit" is the actual Poe reeling around Baltimore drunk, deranged and dying. Fonda and Delon play sadistic assholes, Stamp is a troubled artist.)

We get herds of nuns, flashbulb-ing paparazzi, traffic jams, all reeled out as character-packed mod-Bosch canvases under Inferno-red skies. Toby is in town to make a western retelling of the story of Christ, for which he will we receive a Ferrari, more specifically a golden Ferrari 330 LMB. (What would Jesus drive?)

Stamp staggers through a purgatorial television talk show, distracted by multiple cameras and multiple hosts,alternately morose and grandiose, playing it up to the hilt for a disapproving and fascinated audience.

The awards banquet is your standard Fellini party scene with Toby in full tailspin. He attains an odd moment of lucidity reciting a monologue from Macbeth onstage, giving a glimpse of the talent he's droned in drink and drugs (there's more than a dash of The Richard Burton Story here.)

 

Finally, Toby gets his sweet sportscar and we're off! He whizzes to the outskirts of the city to a small town. The joy of speed gives way to the realization that he's lost and cannot find his way back. (It kind of reminds me of them time i got lost in Detroit somewhere between Hamtramck and downtown, just turning endlessly along unlit, overgrown roads, hoping I didn't run out of gas before sundown. Then I found a little bulletproof-glassed minimart in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of really nice guys gave me directions back.)

 

Toby keeps driving in that beautiful Ferrari, a one-man car chase, speeding along until a succession of dead ends, turnarounds, roundabouts and plazas repeatedly bring him to a halt. The town has somehow folded in on him and, no matter where he turns, he can't seem to get out. And the cardboard cutouts are closing in again...

... and it falls down and goes boom...

Spirits of the Dead isn't quite a horror film, though it does have a few cringe-inducing moments and the Fellini installment is creepy in its own peculiar way. But for atmosphere and style, it's a movie that's hard to beat.

Three the Hard Way

Can I get a "Hell, yeah!" or, at the very least, a "What! What!"

Three the Hard Way is a blaxploitation flick directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. of Super Fly fame and starring legendary football player Jim Brown, football player of some repute and grindhouse hero Fred Williamson and martial arts star Jim Kelly, whom you probably know from Enter the Dragon. They're fighting  Nazis.

It seems a group of business-suited white supremacists have somehow created a poison (unlike today's business-suited white supremacists, they actually believe in science) that will kill only the black residents of Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Jim Brown's buddy finds out about this, they kill buddy and kidnap Jim's girl. So it's time to go out and get some payback. And save a few million people, of course. Give back to the community...

It was seeing shit like this that made the NRA and Ronald Regan
support gun control back in the 60s.

Along with plenty of righteous 70s threads, Brown shows off the tremendous physical grace--vaulting over barricades, leaping down stairwells, hanging on to the hoods of cars--that helped him lead the NFL in rushing for eight seasons (Although note that the suit is worn with a nice pair of kicks--which i am guessing are Pumas or Keds--because no one could do this in a pair of alligator Ferragamos.) Three the Hard Way does not stint on prolonged action scenes and isn't that why we're all here anyway?

 Although the fact that two of those action sequences involve wrecking a herd of sweet Detroit-made sedans and pumping hundreds of bullets into a collection of vintage pinball games does make a me a little sad. The latter takes places once Jim  Brown travels to New York City to get the first member of his posse: Fred Williamson. Fred Williamson is, as always, one smooth badass who always seems to be having a good time in his flicks, even crap like 1990: The Bronx Warriors and he seems to be enjoying Three the Hard Way even more than usual.

 

Then we come across Jim Kelly, or at least his bitchin' Lincoln  Continental having drugs planted in it by a herd of crooked cops. But with a mighty yell of  "Gonna set me up?!" he kicks the crap out of them.

It's a bit like a drawn-out version of a similar skirmish in Enter the Dragon; the next sequence will also reference the climactic car wash battle in Black Belt Jones. Our heroes manage to capture one of the Nazis and figure he ought to be good for some information...

We then get a glorious montage of a red-white-blue clad trio of biker babes coming into Manhattan from Brooklyn. The ladies are Countess, Princess and Empress (the last of whom is played by Irene Tsu of Ebony, Ivory and Jade, so she's rolled like this before). And, well, the ladies handle interrogations in a way that gives pause to even this rather rugged set of gentlemen. (If you want true brutality, call upon the women.)

More fistfights, more car chases, more running around shooting. It occurs to me that we never learn how these guys know each other or how they all became such profound ass-kickers. Usually they at least throw in a line about being Green Berets in 'Nam or, in this case, ex-football players. (Even Kelly, though he didn't go pro--he was also apparently a hell of a tennis player, though i somehow sense he must've had some hoop game as well.) We see Jim Brown as a producer (of the Impressions), but no idea what the other two guys do.

This band of nutjob cartoon white supremacists lacks the over-the-top misanthropic lunacy of a Donald Trump or Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee, any of whom would be a far more ridiculous villain than Three the Hard Way's unctuous businessman. The Nazis of Three the Hard Way aren't really your classic movie Nazis: Their hair touches their collars and they are listening to music with acoustic guitars and synthesizers which, as we all know, is mixing the races. Their Nazi banquet is totally dorky--no The Damned or The Night Porter decadence here.

 

 

It's pretty obvious that our trio of heroes certainly possess physical, intellectual and sartorial superiority  over these schlubs in berets. (A beret only works if you're a chick doing some kind of Bonnie Parker/Patty Hearst or a guy with good hair and cheekbones that could cut diamonds who is somehow affiliated with MI6.)

The climactic attack on the Nazi mansion has that peculiar day-for-night mix where you keep wondering if the battle took three days or we're on an alternate Earth where the days and nights are 15 minutes long. Still, busting up Nazis in a flawlessly spherical 'fro and black leather pants, Jim Kelly comes off like a cross between Dr. J., Bruce Lee and Iggy Pop. Can you imagine anything cooler? Jim Brown shows off his superior skill at kicking down doors and leaping across furniture while firing a shotgun. Fred Williamson lays waste to many bad guys without taking the grin off of his face or the cigar out of his mouth.

One can fantasize that Eric Garner had been endowed with the cop-clobbering powers of Jim Kelly. Or that right at the moment Dylan Roof raises that gun in the Emanuel Church, Jim Brown busts through a stained-glass window, slides down the aisle and shotguns the little cracker with the Moe Howard haircut. A superhero ass-kicking wasted on a redshirt weasel, but still... 

... anyway, Three the Hard Way could do with a little more plot, but it's still pretty damn gratifying.