CineCoup @cinecoup - Tumblr Blog

Mission #10: The Roast - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 2)

BLACK FOOT

It’s always been a big mystery to me why there aren’t more Canadian Sasquatch films. Actually, it’s a mystery to me why all Canadian films aren’t about bigfoot to some degree, but I suppose one has to be realistic. Still, we have a few, like the lame Sasquatch, from 2002 (Lance Henrikson was in it of course), and Drawing Flies (something produced by Kevin Smith in 1996, an early example of his strange obsession with Canada, I suppose); and if you stretch the point you might include pictures like Ghostkeeper and The Dark in that genre. Black Land will therefore be a most welcome addition to the canon.

My own introduction to the Sasquatch genre was Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot, which I saw at the Park Theatre back in the late 1970s. Of course it terrified me beyond all capacity for reason, but what didn’t register for me then was that the movie was set in Canada, deep in the B.C. interior, bigfoot country. That would have scared me even more, probably.

But, like Class of 1984, Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot isn’t really a Canadian film. In fact it isn’t a Canadian film at all, though it is sometimes categorized as one. I myself got in touch with the director, Ed Ragozzino, who was a little baffled at why I would want to talk to him at all, given that I was writing about Canadian movies. (Actually I knew by then that his movie wasn’t Canadian, and just wanted to tell him how much his weird little crypto-documentary had terrified me at age six.)

Viewed today, the movie is not so much terrifying as it is a little boring. But it does still manage moments of elegant frisson, particularly in the climax, when the crude perimeter alarms the Bigfoot hunters have set up are tripped by the approaching beasts. And to me it was inspirational, as, when I had a chance to make my own Bigfoot documentary (There’s Something Out There, made for CTV in 2007), I borrowed this movie’s strategy of peppering its facts, or so-called facts, with scary re-creations of true-life bigfoot encounters.

Of course my re-creations, which were shot on film and used a genuine creature suit created by special makeup effects master Doug Morrow, were cut out of the final production, by me, not by CTV. I used the footage for a music video later on, so it all worked out in true Canadian film fashion. But I still deplore the paucity of Canadian bigfoot films, and you filmmakers who may be reading this, consider this a call: make a Canadian bigfoot film! Make the Great Canadian Bigfoot Film if you can! I challenge you! I dare you! I beg you!!!

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #10: The Roast - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 1)

BALLS-OUT BRAWL

Making fun of Canadian movies is something of a national sport, and though many of those who engage in it do so from a position of hard-hearted ignorance – bemoaning their unwilling participation as taxpayers, to use the most common, most idiotic example – the rest of us, certainly me, Kid Because We Love.

An easy target, one I frequently take potshots at, are the many co-productions and offshore films that are produced in Canada. The presence of High School Brawl as this week’s crowd pick makes me think of one of these scary half-Canuck mutants in particular, the fondly-recalled Class of 1984.

Class of 1984, filmed in Toronto in 1982, is an update of The Blackboard Jungle: virtually the same, in fact, but for the addition of brutal rape scenes, power saw killings, hacked-off limbs, a touch of Alice Cooper and a gun-wielding Roddy McDowall. These are all improvements, of course. Funny thing though: with secret Canadian Glenn Ford in the lead, The Blackboard Jungle would probably score more Can-Con points than its more violent decedent. Class of 1984 has a decidedly Yankee Doodle cast of principals (along with the mid-Atlantic McDowell); but the supporting players form a marvellous gallery of Canadian genre movie sub-superstars. The most famous of these is of course Michael J. Fox, baby fat still intact, playing a victimized nice guy. But we also get Lisa Langlois (from Phobia, Happy Birthday to Me and Deadly Eyes), Keith Knight (from Meatballs, My Bloody Valentine and Of Unknown Origin) and Al Waxman, whom most people will know best from that time he exploded in the giant snake movie Spasms.

So, even though it’s not all that Canadian a movie, Class of 1984 is a must-see for the Canadian film enthusiast. Perry King plays the schoolteacher hero, a wide-eyed naïf in the style of any young movie teacher, and Timothy Van Patten plays his quasi-punk antagonist, a piano prodigy who’s found a more satisfying sideline in merciless bullying. McDowell is a veteran teacher who knows the only way to get these gosh-darn kids to learn is at the point of a gun. It all comes to a satisfying climax on the school’s rooftop, once King has moved from his initial naïveté straight past jaded cynicism and into a sort of feral hunter-killer state. One imagines Van Patten, having fallen through the skylight and been hanged above a horrified crowd, opening his eyes on the call of “cut,” and then he and King and director Mark L. Lester shaking hands with the Toronto crew and bidding them farewell before that last limousine ride out to Pearson, and then the red-eye out West, to Hollywood, to home.

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #9: Franchise - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 2)

HELLMINGTON NIGHT

The film industry’s cynical embrace of the word “franchise,” as applied to a series of sequels, was anticipated by at least one gimlet-eyed prophet: the late bearded bulldog-Blake of Canadian cinema, Peter Simpson.

Simpson conceived of the film-as-galaxy, a cosmology more complicated than, say, the so-called “Marvel Universe.” In Simpson’s imagining each movie at once stood alone, was related to every other movie, and, most crucially, itself contained worlds beyond counting, just as in the poet’s grain of sand. The makers of Hellmington would do well to take a page from Simpson’s book.

A strong hint that you’re watching a Peter Simpson production is if the movie takes place on prom night, no matter what the weather is like outside. Beyond that, all bets are off. Simpson was fond of losing all faith in whatever film he was making, yelling and carrying on in a Joel Silver-esque style, then taking the third act in some completely unforeseen direction of his own invention. If anyone today still has their “Another Simcom Reshoot!” t-shirt in wearable condition, they are a fortunate soul indeed.

The first Prom Night movie was an enjoyable but fairly unassuming slasher movie, though one blessed with an extraordinary cast. The second installment dumps the balaclava-and-lipstick-wearing killer and turns into a story of possession and spectral revenge. The third one continues on this theme, but takes an all-new tone; here, as evidenced by a scene where George Chuvalo is transformed into an ice-cream sundae, anything might happen, and it will be supposed to be witty and charming. The fourth film returns to the slasher paradigm, but with supernatural trimmings and a creepier villain. (How it nevertheless manages to be a blander picture than the first installment remains one of the franchise’s great mysteries.)

This conceptual elasticity could well serve any burgeoning horror franchise, and it would be nice to see Hellmington take the same approach. You might apply any horror movie trope – slashers, monsters, aliens, whatever – or even some entirely new one, to only the loosest of haunted-house starting points. Perhaps at some point in the future, when the series has built up enough good will and box-office traction, some intrepid franchisee might even set an episode on prom night.

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #9: Franchise - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 1)

GOONBALLS

While “franchise” is a term that probably should have stayed within the fast-food industry which likely spawned it, if one allows its application to the arts, and to cinema in particular, Canada may be said to have a few film franchises of its own.

Some of these are official and some not; to the latter category belongs that special class of pictures gloriously suffixed with the word “balls.” Like Goons, the Balls pictures are comedies, and one assumes the holders of the Goons trust will apply it likewise as a suffix, so that we may anticipate Screwgoons, Firegoons, or one day maybe even Oddgoons.

After the great success of Porky’s, the floodgates were opened, and Rafael Zielinski, clearly not a man to let opportunity pass by, donned his hip waders and jumped in, creating Screwballs and somehow pixilating Warner Bros. into distributing it. Screwballs exemplifies the central irony of the Balls films: their name may be Balls, but their hearts rest with an entirely different human globular structure, namely boobs.

Screwballs and its direct sequel, Screwballs II: Loose Screws, are easily the exemplars of their subgenre, since the single-minded, even primal, pursuit of breasts is not merely an exploitation-ready filmmaking approach, but is central to whatever plots the movies have. The other movies don’t shirk from this important preoccupation, however: Fireballs, which features a performance from Jon-Mikl Thor (perhaps because his own breasts are more prominent, certainly shinier, than those of many ladies), is a movie about firemen who like to look at boobs. Oddballs, though restricted by its curious lack of actual nudity, features camp counsellors who like to look at boobs. (It also features Foster Brooks playing, guess what, a drunk.) Snowballin’, which should be a Canadian film but somehow is not, otherwise fits comfortably in the Ballsiverse.

The great chronicler of the form is really Paul Corupe, master of the Canuxploitation website; his historical appreciation of them on that site is very much worth reading. (I haven’t looked at the article in some time, but have still undoubtably managed to steal some of his Balls jokes – pace Paul!) Imagine, if you can, a return to those shameless glory days, when every comedy film released by Canadian producers demonstrates a go-for-broke insouciance, an almost aggressive lack of sophistication and a pathological obsession with breasts, all while proudly showing off its own balls!

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #7: Hype - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 2)

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HENCHMEN

As Henchmen points out, nobody thinks of the henchmen, who are usually little more than the bad guy’s evil appendage or else simply nameless cannon fodder. But when the henchmen are as charming as those in the modern classic Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare, who else can you think of?

The main antagonist in this delightful opus is a big rubber demon, but it’s his little pals, the devilish mischief-makers in his employ, who really capture the heart. They peep in at ladies, hork into drinks, peer over the edge of the sound mixing console and show up in the leftovers. They’re a hardworking bunch and no mistake.

There are other characters in Rock n’ Roll Nightmare, one must admit. There’s the hero, a lion-maned muscle-rocker called Thor, who turns out not to be any regular boogie van-driving codpiece aficionado but an angelic combatant for the forces of good. Or one might look at Thor’s bandmates and their girlfriends, a vacuous bunch who’ve taken over a haunted Ontario farmhouse to make their latest record, and to have sex. Then there’s the big rubber demon at the end, a rod puppet with bug eyes and a fixed, toothy grimace. Thor’s climactic wrestling match with this entity is a true wonder.

The movie has its faults, of course; what seven day, $50,000 production does not? Hair metal enthusiasts should be well satisfied however, and those who enjoy animated pieces of rubber will come away similarly pleased. There’s considerable crossover in those demographics too, and if you’re in the dark zone of that Venn diagram, prepare to have your mind truly blown.

Much has been written about Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, and with good reason. It seems like an absurdly extended comedy sketch, with comedy sketch production values and special effects to go with it; but at the same time there’s an appealing sincerity to the whole enterprise, perhaps best exemplified by Thor’s early-film assertion that “Toronto is where it’s at, man! The music, the film industry, the arts!” Canada needed such a champion in those dark post tax-shelter days, and Thor was ready to shoulder the burden.

Unfortunately he really didn’t get the chance, since his movie career appears to have never really taken off. (His metal career on the other hand has been going moderate-to-strong for decades.) A sequel to Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare was made almost twenty years later, but word on the street is that the less said about this, the better. Too bad.

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #7: Hype - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 1)

GOONIOR

While the fraternal band of hooligans in Goons appear to be nominally on the side of good, the band of thugs in Junior, in particular the nutty Junior himself, are among the most hateful villains in Canadian film history.

When a pair of ex-hookers arrive in a small lake town to start new lives at a broken-down marina, they immediately raise the ire of the local sheriff and the sinister band of rednecks who dwell nearby. These goons begin a campaign of harassment so unrelenting that anyone but K.C. and Jo, our heroines, would have booked it after the first rape attempt, or at the very least the second.

K.C. and Jo, and a third woman whom they rescue from Junior’s depredations, decide to stick it out though, and what they put up with over the entire middle section of the movie is truly unbelievable. Oh sure, Junior and assorted other hoot-n-holler boys feel the wrath of these short-short-short-wearing ladies, but even so, they do a fearsome amount of damage before they’re through.

Junior began life as an afterthought, a small amuse-bouche cooked up on the Hudson, Quebec set of Meatballs III. Producers Don Carmody and John Dunning had been notified that the marina set they’d secured for the sex-comedy threequel had to be dismantled; wasn’t it a shame, they thought, that the Meatballs III script didn’t call for a climactic conflagration. The spirit of Roger Corman (then and still alive, but never mind) possessed them, and they decided to write a whole new movie whose climax called for just that. A few drinks later they had a story, and a few days later, a script.

Of course it’s not the best Deliverance riff ever made in Canada (that would be Rituals), nor the best rural-revenge picture (Death Weekend and Baker County U.S.A. both trump it), but Junior has its pleasures. The acting is of a type I think of as good-bad – in other words, exactly the type of acting required by a story like this. Junior himself, played by Jeremy Ratchford, is a particular exemplar of this style. (Turns out I worked with Ratchford in my days as a camera assistant, on a movie-of-the-week called Getting Gotti; had I recognized him, I would surely have shouted “It’s fuckin’ Junior!” and shaken his hand.)

Sure, Junior seems exactly like a movie conceived over mai-tais sucked back on the banks of the Ottawa River, written in a big hurry, and shot on a paltry budget, all expressly for the purpose of showing off ladies in skimpy outfits and blowing up a big boathouse; but hey, so what? Junior’s incursions get a little repetitive (though the worm-filled fish are a nice touch), and not infrequently are kind of mean-spirited and rape-centric, but at least the ladies always triumph in the end. It’s an energetic little movie, and the fiery climax delivers exactly what its makers always intended: an exploding marina.

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #6: Another Angle - Bullets, Blood and Beaver! (Part 2)

NOWHERE BULLIES

In considering the tale of Nowhere Fast, a comedic sports action movie about rival stationary bike gangs, one’s mind turns naturally to Heavenly Bodies, the 1984 comedic sports action movie about competing jazzercise gangs. But in looking at the alternate angle on Nowhere Fast, the gooftastic Ca-knuckler Bullies occupies the mind instead.

Bullies, from 1986, is in most respects a typical backwoods revenge picture, but because the movie also tries to shoehorn in a Romeo & Juliet subplot, it spends more time than usual with its loathsome antagonists, a family of bullies called the Cullens.

The Cullens run their little B.C. mountain town like a fiefdom, completely dominating the local mayor and sheriff, and murdering people whenever they feel like it. When young Matt and his family move in, they get bullied too, and after much bullying and a little light romance between Matt and the comely Becky Cullen, a final showdown comes nigh.

Matt, played by the late Jonathan Crombie, doesn’t sit down to watch Straw Dogs and First Blood before enacting his vengeance, but he might as well have. Thankfully he’s been taught the art of Spear-the-Hoop by his Wise Old Indian pal, who is of course named Will Crow. (Will Crow is played by Dehl Berti, an actor who, through his career, suffered character names like John Eagle, Sidney Eagle, Sun Eagle, Grey Bear, George Running Bear, Black Elk, White Elk, Little Buffalo and Mr. Indochine.)

We get to know the Cullens a little bit in the picture, but not enough to understand their motives or learn how they became such unredeemable bullies in the first place. They’re not particularly memorable villains – contrast them, for example, against the slobbering menace at the center of Junior, or Don Stroud’s stringy-haired psychopath in Death Weekend.

Paul Lynch, the man who brought us Prom Night and Humongous, was behind the camera for Bullies, and plays his cards close to the chest for an hour or so before stepping things up for a lively, violent climax. Like any Canadian 80s B picture worth the designation, Bullies features a score by Paul Zaza and photography by René Verzier; these aspects, along with the final twenty minutes of explosions and gunfire, make the picture worth a look.

- words by film historian Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #6: Another Angle - Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 1)

RENO LOVES THE “DOC”

Postmen has been reimagined as a romantic comedy, and maybe this shows that romantic comedy was latently coded into its DNA from the beginning. In its first frames almost any movie is a wealth of endless possibility, and where it goes from there is up to the filmmakers. If the tale is well-told, the narrative path will seem natural, as though it’s the only sensible route.

But some movies, like the odd B.C. obscurity Reno and the “Doc”, hedge their bets and choose to go everywhere at once, to follow every possibility offered by their conceptual starting point. It’s a weird approach to moviemaking. Reno and the “Doc” introduces us to an itinerant con man, the “Doc,” who has just concluded his latest episode of card-sharping somewhere in Vancouver and is on the road again. Suddenly he begins smelling dogfarts that aren’t there, and experiencing other extrasensory stimuli. Well, it turns out that he’s become psychically connected to a reclusive mountain dweller called Reno, the owner of the flatulent dog. Reno happens to be a great skier, too, and rest assured that this will figure in the plot. He also has an ongoing feud with a local group of wildmen known as the Kukamungas, and rest assured this has nothing to do with anything besides providing the opportunity for a few small explosions.

The mental telepathy, every occurrence of which is heralded by a “deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle” effect on the soundtrack, brings the two main characters together pretty quickly, and, though Reno is understandably freaked out by having a stranger who can read his thoughts suddenly intrude on his (near-) monastic life, they become tender chums to nearly the degree seen between the letter carriers in the reimagined Postmen trailer. Reno plays his trumpet for his new pal the “Doc,” while the “Doc” enjoys visiting Reno while he’s in the shower.

When con men gain access to the sort of telepathic powers on view here, their first thought is usually of Vegas, where such a team could easily break the bank. The makers of Reno and the “Doc” must find that convention as boring as I do, because instead of Vegas, the “Doc” settles on Whistler as the place to make a fortune. You see, there’s a ski competition on, and Reno is a natural, if untested in the competitive realm. So suddenly the movie becomes a Warren Miller wet dream, with plenty of slow-motion schussing and slaloming action. This stuff is every bit as boring as a session at the blackjack tables, but has at least the advantage of being unexpected.

There’s a bad-guy skier of course, a Roy Stalin type called Günter who screams incessantly that he’d rather not compete with a rube like Reno, and spends all his spare time trying to get the psychic duo ousted from the competition. In the meantime, the telepathy aspect only becomes an issue at random moments, like when Reno has sex and the “Doc,” some fifteen miles away at the time, hanging out with a bald, bearded and bewildered bartender, has a loud orgasm of his own.

Had Reno and the “Doc” been an entrant in the CineCoup contest, it surely would have stumbled at this challenge. After all, when a movie tries to be a crime drama, a sports movie, a character comedy, a tale of surprising emotional connections between men, a backwoods action picture and a supernatural fantasy all in one, what possible alternate take is there?

Be among the first to find out the 2015 CineCoup Top 15!

Indie filmmakers, fans and media - be the first to know who will advance to the pivotal CineCoup Top 15 on Monday, May 11! Watch their best work on the big screen along with a Top 30 highlight reel and introductory remarks by CineCoup. Come out and support your local indie filmmakers who will be advancing one step closer to up to $1 million in production financing and a release in Cineplex Theatres. This is a FREE event hosted by CineCoup at Cineplex. VANCOUVER: http://cinecouptop15revealvancouver.eventbrite.ca

EDMONTON: http://cinecouptop15revealedmonton.eventbrite.ca

TORONTO: http://cinecouptop15revealtoronto.eventbrite.ca

MONTREAL: http://cinecouptop15revealmontreal.eventbrite.ca

Remember, stakes are high: the Final 5 will travel to the Banff during the Banff World Media Festival to pitch to an industry panel on June 8, 2015, and one project will be selected for up to $1 million in financing and release in Cineplex theatres.

Keep your night free, and join us after the Cineplex screening for some tasty beverages - locations TBD and will be announced at the theatre.

Can’t make it out? The Top 15 teams will be revealed online on the same day at 9PM ET, so keep your eyes peeled for the results at www.cinecoup.com!

**IMPORTANT**: The event is FREE but you must reserve your seat via EVENTBRITE. Please note you MUST PRINT your ticket and take it to the Cineplex box office on reveal night. Seating is limited. Extra tickets will be released at the box office 15 minutes prior to the event.

#CineCoup #BeBrave #Cineplex #Cdnfilm

Mission #5 - Conceptualize: Bullet’s Blood & Beaver! (Part 2)

QUEST FOR PRIMORDIA

In Primordia, a secret society of immortals, batwinged now we know, battle their nemeses (because what else are you going to do with a nemesis?) on behalf of a people of destiny. And what this hard core nerd-store teen fantasy puts me in mind of is the glorious nonsense of Quest for the Lost City.

Now, this may seem like an insult, because by any objective standard Quest for the Lost City isn’t a good movie. Under the title The Final Sacrifice, it’s well-known as an object of Mystery Science Theater ridicule. But like any committed fantasy, its mere existence demonstrates an admirable conviction.

It’s not easy to come up with an original fantasy concept; Joseph Campbell has seen to that. It’s harder still to brave the process of putting it out in the world: inviting hatred, ridicule or, worst of all, total silence. The makers of Quest for the Lost City found immortality of a sort, and love, but not a lot of respect. (Primordia, should it ever get made, will almost certainly be a very different kettle of fish.)

Many of you will know the story: how young sweater-model Troy discovers, in his late father’s trunk of delights, a secret map to the lost city of Xiox. It turns out that the lost city of Xiox is located in Southern Alberta, and its secrets are guarded by a bunch of machete-wielding guys who wear balaclavas and are led by a tall, grinning guy in a cape. Thankfully Troy meets the film’s true hero, Rowsdower, a beer-swilling hoser with chipmunk cheeks and a brush-moustache. Naturally he’s sporting a Taber tuxedo.

This exemplar of Canadian masculinity was at one time a member of the balaclava cult, it turns out, so the fact that Troy picked his beaten-up pickup to hide in, of all the beaten-up pickups in Southern Alberta, stands as one of cinema’s bigger coincidences. No matter! They’re on the run now, and the balaclava guys are on their tails.

The dynamic duo of Rowsdower and Troy eventually meet up with Mike Pipper, a grizzled, wonderfully-named prospector who provides a few invaluable clues about the lost city and about Troy’s lost father. Finally the city rises up in the form of a plastic model, the balaclava guys are vanquished, Troy and Rowsdower roll off into the sunset, and the viewer’s heart swells.

There’s a lot of ignorable nonsense about immortality in the picture, and plenty of chase scenes, and when you get down to it the movie is as entertaining without the Mystery Science commentary as it is with. In fact it’s worth trying to find the original, robot-free version if you can, just to experience one of Canada’s oddest contributions to the world’s fantasy cinema in its purest form.

- words by film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #5 - Conceptualize: Bullets, Blood & Beaver! (Part 1)

REBEL HIGH SCHOOL BRAWL

As the virtually forgotten 1987 picture Rebel High begins, a Joe Friday-ish narrator informs us that Rebel High School (its real name) is filled with “beer drinkers, dope smokers, hooky players, liars and assholes.” Really it’s full of lower-tier comedians grappling with material barely worthy of a lesser episode of unmourned sit-coms like Snow Job or Checking Out.

But it also contains high school brawls, and these in plenty. There are wrestling matches, nerd-burns, pie fights and rumbles, and based on the High School Brawl production art, its characters would be at home in either movie.

The plot of Rebel High, insofar as it may be said to have one, involves the school’s administration trying to find a principal who will run the place for more than a couple of days before fleeing in terror. The staff wear WWII helmets and hide in bunkers as the students run amok through the flimsyboard hallways, or just stand around acting obnoxiously. There’s also a glasses nerd with a greased elephant’s trunk pompadour, and he gets victimized repeatedly by the movie’s true antagonists, a trio of monstrous bikers, each of them the size of a commercial refrigerator and significantly less pleasant.

These brutal miscreants are eventually tricked into a van and taken to the zoo, where they belong; but it’s a long road before that blessed event occurs. Even after this bunch of denim-clad apes is dispatched, the remaining, only-slightly-less-despicable students must band together to save their unaccountably beloved athenaeum from the school board officials who quite reasonably want to shut it down, raze it and sow the ground with salt so that nothing may grow there again.

Saving the school, naturally, is easily accomplished by putting on a half-assed talent show, and bingo-bango, everybody’s happy, even the nerd. The actors playing these students are many years past teenagerdom, which makes a certain sense because they’ve been stuck in the school for years, unable to graduate. This is the film’s one explicable aspect. But Rebel High really contains precisely one laugh-out-loud moment: a wrestler’s novel method of indicating he’d rather not accept the position of principal. The rest of the movie is truly dire, and makes even stuff like Screwballs, Oddballs and even Fireballs look brilliant. It’s not one of Canada’s prouder cinematic moments, but it’s well worth a look for the morbidly curious among us.

- words by film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #4: Speechless - Bullets, Blood and Beaver! (Part 2)

GORE AND GAGS: A GREAT COMBINATION

When the proportions are correct, the balance of humour and horror can work splendidly. Based on its response to the Speechless challenge, Love At First Stab may have a chance at becoming an exemplar of this form.

It puts me in mind of another Canadian horror comedy, Killer Party, which stands out for how dedicated its makers seemed to be in finding that delicate balance. Their approach was not one of subtlety; screenwriter Barney Cohen and director William Fruet chose instead to stick in as much stuff as they possibly could in the hopes that some of it would be scary and some of it would be funny.

This sounds like a put-down, I realize, and it’s true that much of the time the movie makes no sense, but even as you wonder what’s going on, you admire the all-in attitude it took to make the thing. It begins with a funeral scene that turns out to be part of a horror movie being screened at a drive-in, which turns out to be the preamble to a Thriller-style long-form music video, and none of this has anything to do with the actual plot of the movie.

It’s a sorority house picture, we eventually find, and involves a lot of hazing, plenty of practical jokes and, eventually, a roaming spirit that does a possession number on one of the sisters. Here, finally, the bodies begin to pile up. There’s also a comedy fat guy, a bunch of songs, a hot tub scene, and, obligatory for the mid-80s, a Paul Bartel cameo.

All that is great, but on the down side, whatever gore the movie might once have had (severed hands, a trident stabbing) was completely excised by its distributor, MGM. That’s a shame, since a movie as looney-tunes as this deserves a little red stuff. But it’s your classic “troubled production,” and although such movies can be compelling, you never get everything you want out of them.

The horror/comedy ratio remains solid, however, even without the gore. Screenwriter Cohen told Fangoria magazine that from the beginning “the idea was to do a horror movie that had more yocks in it than other horror pictures.” The more comedy he put in, the more Fruet wanted, to the point where even Cohen thought they might be going too far. But it all works pretty well, and here’s hoping Love At First Stab can take a page from the Killer Party book.

Mission #4: Speechless - Bullets, Blood and Beaver! (Part 1)

WHERE WOLF? SADLY, NOBODY KNOWS.

The deficit of Canadian fantasy films has already been noted, and whether or not The Sad Prince ends this interregnum remains to be seen. But the concept of speechlessness, the point of this week’s challenge, reminds us that Canada is also lacking in the silent film department. Many of the films that were made in Canada during the silent era have since become lost.

One such production was The Werewolf, made in 1913 and believed to be the first werewolf picture ever. With its princess and its curse, it sounds as much fantasy as horror, and what a shame that the movie was destroyed by fire back in 1924.

The movie, promoted at the time as “distinctly novel,” was directed by Toronto-born Henry McRae, who mostly made Westerns (just about everybody in those days mostly made Westerns), and told the story of Watuma, a native princess who catches the curse of lycanthropy. The loup-garou is exorcised by a wandering friar, but returns a hundred years later to get revenge on… well, probably someone descended from the friar, or maybe some younger friars, or maybe just any friar who happens by. Sadly, we just don’t know.

The 1898 short story on which the movie was apparently based, Henry Beaugrand’s “The Werewolves,” is no help, since it contains no princess and no priest. It tells the tale of a sentry at a proto-Lower Canada forton Christmas Eve of 1706, who fires his musket after seeing a group of “red devils” dancing around a fire outside the gates. There is no evidence of any devils, red or otherwise, or of any campfire, and the sentry is declared a poltroon and punished for raising a false alarm. But “an old weather-beaten trapper” who has been all over the New World, suspects that what the sentry actually saw was a gang of picnicking werewolves, and tells a gruesome tale from his past to back this theory up. Sergeant Bellehumeur, meanwhile, doesn’t believe a word of it.

So The Werewolf was at best a loose adaptation of Beaugrand’s two-page chiller, but the movie nevertheless stands as a part of history, and the beginning of the grand if sporadic Canadian cinema tradition that would later bring us the likes of Ginger Snaps and WolfCop. For that, we must honour The Werewolf, and swear to do our best to find any prints that may have survived that long-ago conflagration. - Words by film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #3: The Poster - Bullets, Blood and Beaver! (Part 2)

Wheelchair Madness: The Changeling

Canada has few haunted house movies in its cinematic history, and even if it had more they’d likely be eclipsed by the one everybody remembers: The Changeling. Hellmington therefore has a tough job ahead of it, but its evocative poster concepts give it a strong start.

The Changeling’s publicists correctly identified the movie’s scariest and most memorable prop: the vintage wheelchair which chases Trish Van Devere around a Vancouver mansion. Naturally they put it on the poster, where it projected the shadow of the little Casper responsible for all the banging and moaning heard in the movie.

The movie itself is as snowbound as you’d want a Canadian picture to be, and it’s atmospheric and scary in the bargain. Like all of these higher-budget tax shelter films, the higher reaches of the cast list is populated with Americans, principally George C. Scott, his then-wife Trish Van Devere, and Melvyn Douglas in the title role. Unlike so many of them, including of course Agency, it actually lives up to the promise of its poster.

The poster was a big reason The Changeling hauled in 12 million smackaroos and became one of Canada’s biggest box-office hits when it was released early in 1980. As a result of its box-office accomplishment, it won the Golden Reel award in 1981, though Scott never showed up to accept it. (It’s not certain he was even invited.)

Though posters count for a lot less these days than they did in 1980, a film’s key art is still one of the most powerful factors in creating its identity. If you can come up with an evocative image that accurately represents the film, as The Changeling managed, then your movie stands the chance of a long and profitable screen life. Who remembers the poster image of Clint Eastwood’s 2008 non-horror Changeling? Who remembers the plot, or even the very existence of the movie? Probably not even Clint himself.

- Words by film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal.

Mission #3: The Poster - Bullets, Blood and Beaver! (Part 1)

A Majors-League Stinker: Agency

Agency, it ought to be said right off the top, is not one of your great Canadian exploitation movies, but it is the only one I can think of that opens with a song about ball sweat. It also fits nicely into what I like to think is something of a Great White North tradition: decent-looking posters.

This doesn’t mean they’re all great, and they’re not up to the high Polish standard, but Canadian genre pictures of a certain age seem very frequently to have eye-catching and memorable print art. CineCoup’s The Postmen manages to approach this arena with its own art, in particular the iteration with the paper-wrapped gun.

While Postmen is about the secret superspy lives of letter carriers, Agency reveals the true nature of advertising executives: they’re actually mind-control experts in the employ of a powerful right-wing cabal. Lee Majors is the superstar ad man whose company is bought out by a very sleepy Robert Mitchum with the aim of embedding secret messages in chocolate milk powder ads. Saul Rubinek jumps around the edges of the story, insisting between drags on his cigarette that Mitchum is up to no good; and then he somehow ends up frozen solid in his fridge. (This leads to a scene reminiscent of the one in Animal House when the dead horse is removed from Dean Wormer’s office.)

By its countless shots of a flapping stars n’ bars, we know the picture is meant to take place in some nameless American city but to the discerning viewer Agency couldn’t be a more Montreal movie if the edges of the frame were festooned in smoked meats. Majors is introduced jogging past Habitat ‘67; there are plentiful shots of that big Bank of Montreal building; and the atmosphere in general is so wintry one expects Bonhomme to stroll by at any moment. On top of this the movie faithfully obeys the tax shelter-era rule that at least one of the guys from Rituals must make an appearance. (Here it’s Gary Reineke, playing a leather-jacketed hit man.) There’s also a cameo performance by the Mickey Mouse phone from Bells.

That the poster is better than the movie itself entirely befits a movie about advertising. Conceptually, the idea of high-rise rooftops forming the title of the film is a little awkward, but it works here, even when combined with that great standby of 1970s poster art, Faces In Little Boxes. Movie posters are so important to the film that Rubinek’s character has them plastered all over his walls, including, curiously, one for the Tor Johnson vehicle The Unearthly.

Like such fellow clams as Mr. Patman or Nothing Personal, Agency is only for tax-shelter era completists. It does however fulfill one important function in film history: namely, letting the world in on just what Lee Majors was up to between The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy.

- Words by film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal

Mission #2: The Differentiator - Bullets, Blood and Beaver!

Read on to get the nitty gritty on Canadian genre films of the past and how they relate to our weekly Crowd and Critic. By film historian and author, Caelum Vatnsdal.

There’s No Vaccine for Spring Fever

A perky oddball looks for love and pursues a dream involving racquet sports. This could describe any number of Canadian movies, and it looks as if John Goes to the Olympics fits into the genre, too. But the queen of this realm is Spring Fever, featuring the No. 2 world junior champion tennis player Carling Bassett.

Bassett wants to win some kind of tennis tournament in Florida, while her mother, Vegas showgirl Susan Anton, wants to wave cocktails around and date leisure suits. There’s plenty of mother-daughter conflict, pubescent romance, old men sacked by tennis balls, and tennis. Lots of tennis.

Like Porky’s, Spring Fever is a Canadian movie made in Florida; but unlike Porky’s, and despite a semi-raunchy poster image so misleading it became the subject of nearly the whole of a baffled Roger Ebert’s review, Spring Fever is not a teen sex comedy. It’s got elements of that (but thankfully not much: Bassett was barely into her teens when it was shot), of underdog sports drama, of snobs-vs-slobs culture clash, and of after-school special.

At a certain point the after-school special aspect threatens to eclipse everything else in the movie, even the tennis. Mom’s Vegas showgirl ways cause hassles and embarrassment to poor young Carling, and put her in conflict with a snooty rich family whose daughter also hopes - nay, expects - to win the competition. Mom herself has a history of ignoring her daughter in favour of just the sort of guy you’d expect to be hanging around Vegas shows in the early 80s. Turns out this sort of guy also likes to hang around adolescent girl tennis tournaments, so the vow of temporary datelessness she offers Carling at the beginning of the film doesn’t last long.

But of course romance beckons for young Carling too, just as it no doubt will for John on his trek to the Olympics. Spring Fever trundles along all the expected paths, and harbours no surprises; and like all good Canadian tax shelter-era films, it works overtime to seem as American as possible. From its Las Vegas and Florida location work to its pointless use of “America the Beautiful” over the opening credits, the movie could hardly be more Canadian. The film was produced by Bassett’s father, the tennis player and entrepreneur John F. Bassett, who also brought us gems like Paperback Hero and The Pit before dying in 1986 of not one but two brain tumours.

While the original title of Sneakers might have made (slightly) more sense, it still warms the heart to think of all the feather-haired bros who paid up for this one believing they were going to see a beach-n-boobs picture about some upside-down guy getting light beer sprayed on his balls. Sorry dudes! Hope you like tennis.

Watch the Skies for a Starship Invasion

Canada and quirky alien invasions are a natural combination, if Big Meat Eater, Top of the Food Chain and, soon perhaps, Across All Galaxies are to be believed. But the blue tractor beam we see pulling hapless Earthlings into the Across the Galaxies UFO has its most direct antecedent in one of the loopiest Canadian films ever made: Ed Hunt’s 1977 Starship Invasions.

Words can hardly describe the delights this crazy movie offers. It begins with a potato-nosed Mennonite farmer being sucked into a saucer and raped by a beautiful space babe, and it only gets better from there.

Robert Vaughn, the world’s most urbane UFOlogist, shows up to investigate, and soon discovers the Earth is about to be colonized by evil condom-headed aliens lead by Christopher Lee, who plays, of course, Captain Ramses. Fortunately some equally big-headed good aliens are lurking on the ocean floor, ready to help, and Vaughn joins forces with them to battle Ramses and his bunch. Titanic UFO space battles follow, all set to soft jazz music for some reason.

The mass international epidemic of suicides engineered by the bad aliens is a bit of a buzzkill at points, but otherwise this picture is an unvarnished delight. Director Ed Hunt was an American, but he did most of his most memorable work, including some softcore porn and a similarly berserk sci-fi spectacular called The Brain, north of the border. That was in the 80s, and Hunt then apparently left both Canada and the film business for good; though he’s recently resurfaced with a project called Halloween Hell, which prominently features Eric Roberts in a full Dracula outfit and on the whole qualifies as the god-damndest thing ever seen.

With slick photography from Mark Irwin (who shot many pictures for Cronenberg), a gallery of familiar faces in the cast, model-shop effects and a heroic robot saving the day towards the end, Starship Invasions qualifies as prime, grade-A Canadian camp. The scene where the Mennonite recalls his intergalactic tryst with a local cop (”You’re saying you had sexual intercourse with this woman?” “I chore did!”) is as funny as anything on SCTV, and the rest of the picture is up there with it. It’s tempting to compare Hunt’s work with that of another Ed from days gone by, a fellow also not adverse to tossing a pie plate through the air and calling it a saucer; but that would be to undermine the very specific flavour unique to Starship Invasions. It combines the earnestness of the decade’s goofiest genre docudramas with all the production prowess the Golden Horseshoe could muster on such a low budget, and the result is a true unsung gem of Canadian tomfoolery. Find it, watch it, live it!

CineCoup 2015 Road Tour!

It's official - we're packing our bags and hitting the road! Join J. Joly & the #‎CineCoup‬ team as they race across the country between February 9-14 to kickoff CineCoup 2015! We've got another $1 million on the table for a warrior class Canadian film team. Got some questions about the film accelerator model and the upcoming filmmaker intake? Want to meet the people behind the scenes? Want to know what makes a killer CineCoup film team? Just want to slam a whiskey, shake some hands, then be on your way? Then mark these dates on your calendar and snap up your tickets to these meet-and-greets in cities across Canada - and remember, BE BRAVE!

VANCOUVER - February 9: http://cinecoup2015vancouver.eventbrite.ca EDMONTON - February 10: https://cinecoup2015edmonton.eventbrite.ca TORONTO - February 11: https://cinecoup2015toronto.eventbrite.ca MONTREAL - February 12: https://cinecoup2015montreal.eventbrite.ca HALIFAX - February 13: http://cinecoup2015halifax.eventbrite.ca REGINA - February 14: http://cinecoup2015regina.eventbrite.ca

#CineCoup ‪#‎BeBrave‬

#cinecoup #film accelerator #be brave #filmmakers #Canadian filmmakers #road tour #whiskey

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

CineCoup