BODY DOUBLE (1984)
Article 4936 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-23-2015
Directed by Brian De Palma
Featuring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry
Country: USA
What it is: Hitchcockian thriller

A claustrophobic actor becomes a peeping tom when he takes over house-sitting an avant-garde home. He begins the suspect that the woman he is watching is being followed by an ugly Indian with ill intentions.

Yesterday, I watched an extremely low-budget director try to do a copy of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Somehow it’s fitting that today I deal with a big-budget director who almost made a career of trying to emulate Hitchcock. This movie is Brian De Palma’s attempt to redo VERTIGO with touches of REAR WINDOW and with lots of nudity and sex thrown into the mix. Generally, I prefer De Palma when he’s not wearing his love for Hitchcock so blatantly on his sleeve; if you’re familiar with VERTIGO, you’ve got a handle on about ninety percent of the plot of this one. The thing is that De Palma didn’t really need to imitate Hitchcock this much; he could be very memorable in his own way when staging some of his scenes, and at least three sequences in this movie stuck with me for years from the first time I saw the movie. Still, my original viewing did leave something of a negative impression on me; I never cared much for the characters, I found the plot pretty far-fetched, and I found its descent into the porn industry during the final third to be rather unpleasant. I’m a bit more forgiving of much of this on this, my second viewing, but I noticed another problem; there is a lot of dead space in between the big, memorable scenes, and I do think that at least twenty minutes could be pruned from the running time if the movie just picked up the pace. Genre-wise, this is mostly a mystery thriller, but horror pops up in the story in two ways; the opening and closing scenes involve the filming of a horror movie, and the murder that is the centerpiece of the movie is truly horrific. All in all, I liked the movie a little better on this second viewing, but I do think it’s far from De Palma’s best work.

BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1984)
Article 4933 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-20-2015
Directed by Glen Coburn
Featuring Thom Meyers, Laura Ellis, Dennis Letts
Country: USA
What it is: Regional horror comedy

A strange force from outer space is transforming Texas farmers into bloodsucking zombies.

Given the fact that this is a regional film with no doubt a tiny budget, I should probably cut it a little slack. As a horror film, it’s not scary; it does, however, have some very low-budget gore scenes that might interest that crowd. As a comedy, it scores with one line (about incidental music), but that’s about it. Not only are the rest of the attempted laughs not funny, but there are too few of them, which is my way of saying that there’s a lot of dead space. The most interesting thing about the movie is the occasional descents into sheer weirdness; for example, the main characters’ drug of choice is nitrous oxide, the hero responds to a flat tire by destroying his entire car, and a local janitor is obsessed with the word “weird”. I know these scenes are supposed to be funny, but they work better as odd touches. Acting, direction and editing are all subpar. The only names I recognized in the casts were a couple of cameos from Pat Paulsen (as the President) and Jim Stafford (as an idiot). Still, the movie has its fans, but if what the film has to offer you leaves you cold, this may be one of the worst films you’ll ever see.

BLACK MOON (1975)
Article 4930 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-17-2015
Directed by Louis Malle
Featuring Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart
Country: France / West Germany
What it is: Fantasy allegory

In escaping a literal war of the sexes, a young woman seeks refuge in a farmhouse and finds a very strange world.

The tagline for this movie was “An Apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland”, and that’s probably as good a place as any to start with this one. We’re in avant garde/art film territory here, and if there’s any linear sense to be made of it, it’s well-hidden. However, if you think about it, “Alice in Wonderland” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, and if there’s one thing I do get out of this movie, it’s that Louis Malle did have a sense of the magical logic of that work, and he manages to capture it here. There are certain scenes here that recall specific moments in the Alice books; for example, when our heroine picks up the elderly woman and cradles her, it reminded me of the scene where the duchess leaves Alice in charge of a baby who then turns into a pig. The heroine’s search for a unicorn is a central theme, and I suspect that one of the central lessons here is that the unicorn won’t accept her until she accepts the other aspects of the world in which the unicorn dwells. All the characters who have names share the same name with the exception of the rat with whom the old lady chats (actually a wallaby). Snakes pop up as a recurring visual motif, as well as does a score of naked children running with a pig. I have no idea what the title means. Nevertheless, this is one of those avant-garde films that works for me, and I’ll probably give it another viewing some time. Just don’t expect an explanation.

THE BLACK HOLE (1979)
Article 4929 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-16-2015
Directed by Gary Nelson
Featuring Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster
Country: USA
What it is: Science fiction epic

An exploratory spaceship has to make repairs aboard a long-missing spaceship that is near the edge of a black hole in space. There, the crew meets a brilliant scientist (the only survivor of the original crew) and an assortment of robots. The scientist plans to make a journey into the black hole… but has he been totally truthful to the visitors?

I’ve never seen this movie before, but I have heard about it, and what I heard was not good. I’ve heard that it makes no sense, but that’s only the ending; most of the movie is pretty easy to suss out, as it’s your typical “mad genius” movie (think 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA or MASTER OF THE WORLD, and you’ll be within striking range) who has an obsession that may kill everyone involved. There’s an army of robots with blasters, a super-robot with a will of its own, and a pair of cute robots. How cute are they? Well, much as I like Slim Pickens as an actor, to let him voice a robot is just too painful, and the other robot (voiced by Roddy McDowall) speaks in aphorisms; they’re not near as cute as the movie wants them to be. It mostly plays out like an action thriller, but the script is pretty clumsy, and I sometimes sense the actors don’t quite know what to do with it. The ending is largely this movie’s attempt to emulate the star gate sequence of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but directed without Kubrick’s sense of style and with no real point or purpose; I’d say that there is less here than meets the eye, but that would imply that what meets the eye is absorbing. The special effects are impressive, but it’s one of those movies that feels more like it was made to try to cash in on a craze than because it had any point of its own. All in all, my reaction to this one was on the level of a puzzled shrug.

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
Article 4927 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-13-2015
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Featuring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson
Country: USA
What it is: Comic time travel story

A teenager accidentally travels back in time thirty years, and interferes in an event that caused his parents to meet for the first time. He now not only has to find a way to get back to his own time, but also has to bring about events to cause his parents to marry or else he will fade from existence.

As far as this movie-watching project of mine goes, the times when I feel the most uncomfortable with it is when I’m forced to revisit a movie I’ve seen before and for which the outlook I had from that viewing differs sharply from the current critical outlook of the movie. At this point of time, this movie has a very high reputation and is considered one of the great science fiction classics, whereas I came away from my first viewing with some disappointments. There’s a certain high-tech and slick cuteness to the proceedings that I didn’t care for, I didn’t find the performances of Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover in the 1985 incarnations of their characters convincing (though I had no problem with their 1955 incarnations, the ones in the present looked and felt too much like young people trying to pretend to be old people), and I was especially annoyed at the double climax; after resolving the issue involving his parents (which had both personal and existential impacts), I was ready for the movie to end, but the whole action sequence of him returning to the present felt to me like it was just jerking us around with the movie’s fairy dust.

However, watching the movie again does amend my feelings somewhat. My objections to the cuteness and the portrayal of the parents still stands, but I realize that I misunderstood the purpose of the second climax. Rather than being a mere diversion to extend the length of the movie, I realized that the real center of the second climax is the survival of the Christopher Lloyd character, and that added the extra level of dimension that I missed the first time. Actually, I’m surprised I missed this; for both viewings, my favorite thing about the movie was Christopher Lloyd and his performance as Dr. Emmett Brown. I’ve never been a big fan of Michael J. Fox, though I have no issues with his solid performance here. However, I did find it interesting to realize this; the movie initially takes place in 1985 and then shifts to 1955, thirty years earlier. This year is 2015, so I’m watching it thirty years later. That means that the present of this movie is just as distant in the past as the past of this movie is from this movie’s present. This being said, I couldn’t help but notice some of the elements in this movie that make it seem quaint; the Delorean time machine itself, the reference to Pepsi Free (the product placement here certainly didn’t help that drink), and the Fotomat at the mall; it immediately occurred to me that you don’t see any of those around anymore.