DIARY OF A MAD WHITE WOMAN

I do not know that Woody Allen has ever made a movie that is so much about its central performance, to the exclusion of every other concern, as Blue Jasmine; the most recent film of his monumentally prolific career that even comes close is Another Woman, a quarter of a century old. This isn't meant as praise or criticism, merely an observation of what makes Blue Jasmine such a shocking outlier in the director's career, at a point where we'd assume that he would be content to recycle themes and tonalities over and over again, mostly because he's spent much of the last several years doing precisely that.

As just about everybody has already pointed out, the film is essentially a Bernie Madoff-themed gloss on A Streetcar Named Desire, making this the first time that any Allen film has seriously acknowledged the fact that the 21st Century has happened. The title is a reference to Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), whose plush life as a New York socialite and hostess has been devastated by the arrest of her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin, the sole Allen veteran in the cast), who built his massive wealth out of fraud and shady money-juggling. With every tether holding her life in place snapped, Jasmine has nowhere to go but to San Francisco, there to live with Ginger (Sally Hawkins), her sister - both girls, we are told, were adopted by their parents - in circumstances awfully far removed from anything Jasmine has experienced throughout her adult life. Though given the out-of-control cost of living in San Francisco, the alleged unmitigated squalor in which Ginger lives on a grocery store bagger's salary is as unbelievable and out-of-touch as any of the director's attempts to depict the life of the ragged poor. I mean, it's a multi-bedroom apartment in a relatively clean neighborhood safe enough for a clueless woman to wander about, obviously lost; that's like, $2500 a month in San Francisco dollars.

A thoroughly digusted Jasmine makes it her immediate task to constantly berate Ginger for all the terrible things in her life, primarily her choice in men: low-rent ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), low-rent mechanic boyfriend Chili (Bobby Canavale), marginally less low-rent audio technician Al (Louis C.K.). Though really, it's a free-for-all with Jasmine, and no element of limited-budget blue collar life is too innocuous for her to spout off about it with withering, superior rage. In the meantime, everything under the sun is apt to trigger a flashback to the life she'd used to live with Hal, before he went to prison and she had a nervous breakdown, from which she has clearly never quite recovered, and over the course of the film's frazzling 98 minutes, we see in punishing detail how a fragile psyche can break, repeatedly, under too much stress born of loathing - loathing for everything and everyone around oneself, but self-loathing as well, as Jasmine seems at times aware that her aggressive, lying behavior is certainly not making things any better in her daily life.

This is Cate Blanchett's movie, and that's all there is to it. Other people give fine, even great performances: Hawkins in particular is excellent as a desperately cheery mess, easily the best thing she's done since her penetrating small performance in An Education, four years ago. And the men in the cast are all perfectly satisfactory, even though the script never quite manages to give any of them a really solid reason for being there in the first place.

Still, the focus is first and always on Blanchett's portrayal of Jasmine, so it's not merely good luck but absolutely pivotal that she's so fucking wonderful in the role: at a glance, I suppose it's the best performance of her cinematic career, though I'd need to revisit some of her '90s work before I was willing to swear to that in a court of law. It's the best imaginable marriage of performer and character: Blanchett's greatest liability since forever has been a certain brittleness and theatricality, a feeling that she's never inhabiting a role so much as wearing it like pancake makeup, projecting feelings rather than feeling them. All of which is ideally suited to a woman with a fixed, intense desire to be understood as the sum of her surface qualities: inner life is not something Jasmine has much use for, and her carefully manicured way of speaking in a nowhere-in-particular posh accent, and her constant, menacing "fuck you" way of looking at other people are poses that Blanchett adopts wonderfully. So too does she managed to navigate the open sores in Jasmine's personality, the moments when the role requires her to shift reactions and emotions (real or put-on) in just a brief handful of frames, and the terrifying moments where she simply turns off, going perfectly blank on the breath of a single syllable. It's a virtuoso performance, and to be fair, the movie and director absolutely hand it to her; but just because Blanchett doesn't have to work to dominate and show off, that doesn't mean that it's not a magnificent display of skill. Jasmine is a cruel, unlikable figure, pathetic without being sympathetic, and anything less than a perfect performance would leave Blue Jasmine totally acrid and unwatchable; Blanchett prevents that from happening, and it's breathtaking and brilliant to watch.

But again, the performance is the film, and while the whole thing counts, by default, as "good" Woody Allen (coming hot on the heels of the confounding To Rome with Love, this is not such a huge achievement), it's besotted with problems. There are thematic problems: having identified the wife of his made-up Madoff analogue as a bitter woman who cannot feel genuine love, Allen thereupon runs out of ideas what to say with her; and the less said on his inability to conceive of poverty, the better. There are structural problems: the flashbacks are weirdly schematic; and there are massive dead-ends, most notably a bit with Michael Stuhlbarg as Jasmine's rapey employer, a sequence that serves no purpose but to demonstrate that Allen has heard of sexual harassment, but he's never really thought about it. There are crushing aesthetic problems: shot by the talented Javier Aguirresarobe, Blue Jasmine is nonetheless a shitty-looking movie, one of the ugliest that the director has ever graced us with, and he is not at all inclined to make films notable for their visuals, employing instead a hands-off style designed largely to give the actors space to breathe. That works as well in Blue Jasmine as it must, though any movie that makes San Francisco looks this low-rent (even if it fits how the protagonist thinks of it) is doing something inexplicably wrong.

Basically, the film makes a hell of an impact, and Blanchett burns up the screen in her depiction of a fragmenting psychology: but it's not really making any keen observations about that psychology. Arguably, that doesn't matter, and the blistering power of the acting is justification in and of itself. But everything else is awfully shallow, the dark comic tone wanders in and out until the final act where it finally blinks out, the movie has nothing interesting to say about the malfeasance of the rich, and it hardly tells any story at all, let alone an interesting one. It's entirely worth seeing for Blanchett and Hawkins, but a return to form for a spotty filmmaker, it ain't.

7/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: URBAN FANTASY

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: if we're being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously thought of as a new entry in that most modern of fantasy subgenres, in which mythological beasts interact with the glass and steel canyons of the big city. Happily, it is not hard for the bulk of such films to be better at it than The Mortal Instruments.

The word "fanboy" is almost invariably used A) disparagingly, B) in reference to audience members who rabidly consume stories in various genres of movies and comic books, and get profoundly angry at anybody who doesn't love their favored corner of the nerdosphere as much as they do. But this is not the only way to be a fanboy. In fact, a filmmaker can, himself, also be a fanboy (or "herself" a "fangirl", but I do not believe this has ever yet happened), and this, I find, is generally better than when a viewer is a fanboy; for a fanboy-director is likelier to be sincere and enthusiastic and respectful, while a fanboy-viewer is typically going to be a shouty, small-minded artistic totalitarian.

Of all the directors we could potentially call fanboys, surely the best one at it is Guillermo Del Toro - a man who in 2013 got to spend $200 million to make his giant robot toys fight his giant monster toys, under the name Pacific Rim, after all. But even that feature-length love letter to Godzilla is not, perhaps, the most overt work of fanservice in del Toro's career: for that honor, I would point to his 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic series Hellboy, a labor of love that the director (who also served as screenwriter) had been nursing along for years, passing up several surefire blockbusters to finally bring it to completion. It was not a flawless delivery of the director's precious baby - the script manages to be simultaneously overly-descriptive and helplessly opaque - but the one thing it would be quite impossible to claim is that the filmmaker's love of his subject isn't apparent throughout every lovingly-crafted frame. It is one of the most individualised and personally-stamped of all the films of the great superhero boom of the 2000s (which, increasingly, looks to be a different thing than the immediately continuous superhero boom of the 2010s), and if it doesn't end up feeling quite as much of a del Toro film as its sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, it does feel much more like a Hellboy movie, and it is filled with a sense of gee-whiz joy that its follow-up, for all its flashier style and more baroque scenario, doesn't reach.

Which is not to say that Hellboy doesn't have flashy style or baroque plotting; in fact, those are perhaps the two things that most dominate. Plot-wise, the mash-up of several different Mignola stories plays very much like a Lovecraftian gloss on Men in Black, with an oddball investigatory agency based in New York squaring off against a tentacled cosmic evil, sprinkled with a healthy dollop of Nazi occultism, because after all, everything improves when you throw some Nazis at it.* It opens in the '40s with U.S. soldiers interrupting a plot by the immortal Russian mystic Rasputin (Karel Roden), clockwork cyborg Nazi assassin Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), and Aryan she-wolf Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson) to open a portal to a hell dimension filled with unspeakably evil beings, with only an infant demon making it through. 60 years later, that demon has grown - slowly - into a cynical but good-hearted lug named, with misplaced affection, Hellboy (Ron Perlman, ideally cast and wonderfully surly), who works as part of the government's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, under the kindly eye of his adopted father, occult researcher Broom Bruttenholm (John Hurt).

That gets us out of the prologue and into the first act, and it's here that Hellboy gets a little messy in the writing. "Strained" might be a better word for. It's trying to cover a little bit too much territory in too compact a space, presenting an introduction to the characters (done through a bland origin-ish story involving new BPRD agent John Myers, played by Rupert Evans), while also playing as something like a procedural, showing what the team does in the course of their regular days, while also expanding on the Nazi villainy of the prologue, helpfully aided by three ageless Nazi villains. It frankly seems like it wants to be both itself and its own sequel, simultaneously, and this is not least of the reasons that the most straightforward The Golden Army is the better film. Though it's also what gives Hellboy it's personality, as there's a boyish sense of overreach that feels very different, and more satisfying, than mere shoddy screenwriting.

But it's really not the writing that drives the movie, and only slightly more its characters (who are, in the main, appealling and off-kilter without being annoyingly kooky). It's the design and the way that design is captured by del Toro's irreplaceable cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who uses a hugely satisfying visual palette that's heavy on mood lighting and color balance that favors cool shades of blue, grey, and brown, all the better for the bright red Hellboy to pop right off the screen. It's a film that draws most of its power from combining a heightened but recognisable version of the real world (a depiction of New York that looks about as much like a comic book come to life with its graphic qualities intact as any city in any comics-derived film of the '00s) with stupendously elaborate and fanciful design, mostly of Hellboy himself, but also of fellow Bureau monster Abe Sapien (Doug Jones; David Hyde Pierce provided the voice, but refused onscreen credit when he watched the film and realised how fully Jones's acting did all the work of creating the character), and the otherworldly Kroenen, in both his implacable mask-wearing and hideous animate corpse editions.

In fact, Hellboy is so effective at marrying its fantasy action with stylised urban settings that in the final chunk of the movie, taking place in the only overtly fantastic locations of the whole film, it looses quite a bit of energy; it definitely doesn't help that the broad, comic-book style action choreography increasingly degrades into something very typical and CGI-addled: Hellboy was not a very costly film, and its digital effects have not aged well, making it gratifying that del Toro made certain to create so much of the effects through practical means (something he has generally done throughout his career, culminating in the bestiary of his very next feature, Pan's Labyrinth). So much of Hellboy is a breezy, imaginative treat, that it's a genuine disappointment when it turns into just another damn comic book movie.

Still, even at its worst, the film is suffused with a spirit of wide-eyed amazement at its own fantasies, with plenty of spooky-fun creatures that work as black comedy and as campfire story in equal measure. And Perlman's Hellboy is one of the truly great comic hero performances of all time, with the actor managing to be shockingly expressive under a deadening amount of latex. It's nowhere near del Toro's finest achievement, either as a story or as a work of visual imagination, but there's at least a possibility that it's his most untroubled and fun work, meant only to delight and awe, and largely successful in both aims.

(NB: There is a director's cut, more than ten minutes longer than the theatrical, and though I am sometimes agnostic on these issues, there's no contest: it's an improvement across-the-board, clarifying plot details and making the sketchy characters quite a bit more real and lived-in).

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?

This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992's Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered a plot point. Also, one character idly mentions that the main location is his parents' summer home, but nobody needs to worry, because they're never around much in the summer. Which is, after all, roughly when prom tends to fall, maybe just a week or two before it officially begins.

And still, Deliver Us from Evil clearly, unambiguously shows that at the time the film is taking place, there is snow on the ground. Also, there's a snowstorm in one scene, and a line about getting snowed in at night. I mean, I know Canada is cold, but that's just fucking daft.

As reasons go for deciding to hate a movie with all the force of ones's rage, that's an awfully petty one, but maybe if Deliver Us from Evil wasn't such a mildewy little smear of a late slasher film, I wouldn't be driven to be petty towards it. As it is, the film is junk, and unlike the earlier Prom Night pictures, it's not even junk that has some compensating element of off-kilter weirdness or historical interest. It is, for one thing, the most purely, generically structured movie of the tetralogy: in the past, a crazy killer hacks apart some teens and is captured by the authorities, while in the present, he's accidentally freed and goes straight for his own stomping grounds, where he watches a few horny teens screw around before killing them one by one, until just the virginal girl is left to fend off his viciousness. All that separates Deliver Us from Evil from dozens of virtually identical movies is that the killer is quite a bit more coherently conceived than most of them; his stated motivations and his observable behavior actually line up pretty well, and he has a clearly defined personality that is consistent throughout the movie and is nothing at all like the taciturn man-mountains who traditionally hulked around looking for a chance to put a garden tool through a teenager's skull in the slasher film as it existed before 1996.

Also, his "theme", if you will, is particularly unusual: our killer is a religious zealot, and screenwriter Richard Beattie is careful to liven his script up with religious references both trivial but resonant (characters using "god" in dialogue more than usual), and non-trivial and deeply significant (as when the two female leads have a debate about what one should or should not mention in the confessional). It would be asking far too much of a horror film with a IV in the title that it should actually do anything important and complex with all this religiosity, but I admire the film for having more ambition than just running generic teens through a generic scenario, stopping to let them doff their clothes along the way.

Okay, so that's exactly what ends up happening, but the window dressing is particularly unique and challenging. That ought to count for something or other.

The film opens on the same prom night at Hamilton High School in 1957 that opened Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, though neither that film nor Prom Night III: The Last Kiss are otherwise mentioned in this wholly detached sequel, not even the broad idea of "the time the prom queen burned to death in the gym". Instead, we arrive to find the insatiable horndogs Lisa (Krista Bulmer) and Brad (Phil Morrison) escaping prom as quickly as possible - he came stage, she has to ditch her date - to start screwing in Brad's car. They don't get very far at all before being interrupted by menacing Gregorian chants on the soundtrack, which accompany the arrival of Father Jonas (James Carver). We've already met this deranged padre in the film's opening scene, where he feverishly prayed for guidance in ridding the world of all the sluts and whores; plainly not a fellow to forgive a bit of teenaged lust, and he uses his giant, blade-edged crucifix to kill them both with a minimum of pussyfooting around (I was all excited to talk about how Fr. Jonas "crucifucks" people up, but he doesn't use it again until virtually the end of the film, so there's really no opportunity for it). Then he blows up their car.

One can't keep one's deranged religious psychosis hidden when it's accompanied by such splashy actions, and Jonas is apprehended by church authorities and spirited away from his residence at St. Basil Seminary, to be hidden in the basement of St. George Church. And that's where we find him in the frosty summer of 1991, forgotten by all but the caretakers assigned by the higher-ups to keep him safe and sedated. We also meet here recent seminary graduate Fr. Colin (Brock Simpson, officially making it four-for-four as different characters in all the Prom Nights), who thinks that he's about to go to Khartoum for missionary work, but has been selected for a very different goal: he is to replace Fr. Jaeger (Ken McGregor), aged and ill, as the man in charge of keeping Jonas locked away from the world. He accepts this charge i n the spirit of gravity and solemnity with which it was given to him, and Jonas remains locked away for the rest of Colin's long life. The end.

No, so of course the very first thing Colin does is to dick around with the very clear rules laid out for him, and in the blink of an eye, Jonas has killed the young priest and fled to the remains of St. Basil. And thus does a movie that absolutely looks for a full half-hour like it's going to be some kind of strange-as-hell religious horror thriller that has a teenage plot crudely grafted on to facilitate a prom night connection finds its footing and turns into a paint-by-numbers slasher movie with a prom night plot crudely grafted onto its teen sex scenes. Basically, we have Mark (J.H. Wyman), who hasn't yet slept with his not-quite-ready girlfriend Meagan (Nicole de Boer), to the frustration of his pervy, voyeuristic younger brother Jonathan (Fab Filippo); their friends are Jeff (Alle Ghadban) and his very ready girlfriend Laura (Joy Tanner), who spends all her waking days leering at Meagan with a look of beatific joy the likes of which most of us will never feel, the kind of look you can only wear when you were created by a screenwriter and given the only personality trait, "adores having sex more than everything else put together". Eschewing Hamilton High's prom night, they trundle off to Mark's family summer home, an isolated manor that, a few decades ago, was a seminary. One St. Basil, to be exact.

The rest of the movie is the rest of the movie, and while the opening third of Deliver Us from Evil promises to be awful in ways that are at least unusual and unexpected, the last hour is awful in ways that are fully expected, with sex scenes choreographed to show the maximum amount of male and female butt serving as the only punctuation in a languid, aimless collection of scenes of the four teens poking around the house, waiting for the plot to arrive. It undoubtedly got lost in the snow, never expecting such freak weather in May.

In truth, by the standards of a 1992 slasher film, Deliver Us from Evil is terrifyingly functional and effective; but those are very low standards, and if we're to harbor and intellectual dignity at all, we need to set our sights a little higher. And there is no height that this film can rise to: it's crap, and not just crap, but boring crap, with only a four-person compliment of Spam in a Cabin to fill the middle section, and the two men in that equation so utterly interchangeable that by the third scene we have with these characters, we can predict every move they will ever make, so spending time with them is an imagination-starved grind. Plus, Meagan is such a powerfully obvious Final Girl - the film goes miles out of its way to establish what filthy sex-having sluts the other three are - that anything not involving her feels like outright filler.

And the generally putrid acting doesn't make these people any easier to like: only Tanner makes an impression, and I am almost positive it's a bad one, given the static, saucer-eyed, shark-toothed approach she takes to every single interaction in every single scene, as though the actress made the choice "orgasm addict", and let that be the only thing she brought to any moment. That and acidic sarcasm, though the two are harder to mix than you might suppose. Even given all this, she's the only actor I especially cared for; de Boer is thin gruel, and the boys make absolutely no impression at all.

All the film has going for it - the only thing at all - is Carver's weird, screaming performance as the crazy Jonas,and even he is let down by director Clay Borris and cinematographer Rick Wincenty, who rely on too little variation in shots (lot of close-ups, but this was direct-to-video, so it makes sense) and have a tendency to overlight everything but the very blackest scenes, which they underlight. Otherwise, it's the most routine slasher film you could possibly imagine, and while that is pretty impressive for its time frame - most '92 slashers were far too dreadful to be merely "routine" - the film's complete lack of affect makes it neither a satisfying series finale nor a watchable film in its own right. This is just useless, anonymous piffle: lazy storytelling and flat, functional filmmaking, not even interesting enough to suggest that it's for fans of the genre only. This is for nobody, and it is unworthy of the august, if inconsistent, brand name that it besmirches.

Body Count: 9? But it could be 8. The de rigueur twist ending makes it a little hard to tell for certain. Either way, I am not counting the offscreen death by natural causes of an elderly priest who we previously had seen alive.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

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BEACH PARTIES: STUFF AND NONSENSE

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is a film of lasts: the last of the American International beach party movies directed by the series' animating spirit, William Asher; the last starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, no longer resembling teenagers even to the minute degree they did in the earliest films of the run, but still standing in for a certain sense of lingering post-Kennedy youthful idealism and innocence. The one thing it conspicuously isn't the last of, is that it's not the last AIP beach movie, for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff were too good at scraping money off the bottom of a barrel to let their great cash cow die off just because everybody involved in making it had moved on to better things.

It's also the fifth of the damn things to come out in just a 23-month span, sixth if we count the Asher- and Avalon-free spin-off Pajama Party, and it's not remotely surprising that a long-delayed fatigue kicked in, and hard. Perhaps it's the case that Asher and his co-writer Leo Townsend had used up all their best ideas on Beach Blanket Bingo, which came out earlier in 1965 and represents by nearly universal acclaim the highest peak of the beach movie cycle, both at AIP and among their many competitors. Certainly, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini isn't remotely at the level of that movie, which it openly pillages it for ideas - not in the way that all of the beach party films recycle narrative conceits and basically re-tell the original Beach Party of 1963, either. That's just following formula; the whole fun lies in seeing how the new movie will bend itself around to do interesting new things while working out the exact same conflicts and narrative beats. That's traditional. No, what's going on in Wild Bikini is that it's copy sequences and gags directly from its immediate predecessor, and even having the characters call attention to it in one scene; it's as clear a sign of creative exhaustion as you could want from a movie that's plainly run out of gas even without such metatextual evidence.

The action begins in the south Pacific, where Frankie (Frankie Avalon) is doing a stint in the Naval reserve. Petrified that his girlfriend Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) is having as much fun fooling around back in California as he is in Tahiti, he cuts a deal with local witch doctor Bwana (Buster Keaton) to spy on Dee Dee for him, which Bwana does by sending a magical pelican to wander around the beach, stalking her. In the meantime, he has his studiously unseen daughter (eventually played, in a genuinely fun cameo, by Elizabeth Montgomery, Asher's then-wife and star of Bewitched) create a magically perfect woman to drop in among the beach kids and distract all the boys from so much as looking at Dee Dee.

This backfires instantly, when the woman in question, Cassandra (Beverly Adams) immediately falls for Ricky (Dwayne Hickman), who finds her loose, wanton ways a turn-off, and instead decides to pursue the most visibly frigid woman on the beach. Who would, of course, be that same Dee Dee. As for who the hell Ricky is, he's been selected by adman J. Peachmont "Peachy" Keane (Mickey Rooney) as the new face of the All-American Teen Biker, what with the tides of history turning back towards motorcycles and away from surfing. A metanarrative that Wild Bikini deserves credit for bringing in, given that this is exactly what was happening in teen culture at that moment, and it would only be a couple of years before AIP was heavily investing in biker movies itself, abandoning the beach films cold after 1966.

The point is, Peachy needs a girl to go alongside his boy, and Cassandra is plainly it; but she's already become the object of affection of a real biker, albeit a supremely terrible one: Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), who immediately decides to supplant Ricky as the new face of Teen Biking, urgently declaring himself the ideal boy next door, with the make-up artists doing their bit to make Lembeck look every inch of his 42 years, in case we missed the joke.

There is, in other words, a shitload of plot in Wild Bikini, and you will observe that not a huge amount of it centers around Dee Dee, and basically none around Frankie at all. In the latter case, this is supposedly because Avalon demanded too much money and was smacked down by a demotion to a cameo (and not even a cameo mentioned on the poster!), though it's at least as likely that he was simply too busy starring in Sergeant Deadhead and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine for AIP around the same time, films dedicated to the project of finding ways to keep the beach movies alive in the face of a culture that was turning on the surfing fad that had birthed the beach movies in the first place. Funicello, meanwhile, was pregnant, necessitating costumes that were powerfully unsexy and not at all appropriate for beachwear, and perhaps as a direct result of her condition, she appeared to have aged five years in the months since Beach Blanket Bingo, and looked positively foolish cavorting with young adults who themselves were a touch on the old side to convincingly play teens.

No Annette & Frankie, then, and that takes with it most of the reason that any of the beach movies "work": they all have pleasures totally unrelated to the central couple, but the pretext, and the justification, is that tart relationship at the middle of all the movies, fun and flirty and laced with the threat of imminent sex. Take that away - and replace the likably dim Avalon with the painfully anodyne Hickman, who cannot remotely keep up with Funicello's acid-flecked line deliveries in their so-called banter - and you sacrifice all the dramatic spine of movies that, even at their best, had absolutely no dramatic spine to spare.

To replace them: nothing. Nothing but death rattles, far as the eye can see. Left to retread all his best moments from Beach Blanket Bingo, Lembeck is the worst he's been in any of the movies; Keaton, red-eyed and sagging and stuck with cartoon-inspired sight gags far beneath his talents, is just heartbreaking to watch; Rooney is saddled with the absolute worst dialogue of a movie that tortures the language far too much for jokes that don't work, and even though I cannot typically stand Rooney, I still find it tragic how much this movie wastes all of the talents he does have. The songs are grueling, insipid book numbers that have completely abandoned the last inch of surf rock for something perfectly anonymous and trivial; Asher's direction includes very little of the absurdist invention of his best work, relying instead on repetitive slapstick, which is totally fucking insane when you recall that this is the beach party movie with actual fucking magic in it. It should be a field day for cartoon physics, not just one gag played out four times where steam comes out of Buster Keaton's ears.

It is not a complete wash. The opening credits are fantastic: claymation done by Art Clokely, creator of The Gumby Show and Davey and Goliath, neither of which remotely prepare one for the abstract geometry and organic fluidity of of the titles and the shapes and half-formed bodies beneath them; it's closer to Jan Švankmajer than anything resembling American children's television. And Cassandra's titular wild bikini, before she inhabits it, is a floating effect drawn by former Disney animator and director Jack Kinney, who gives even the empty swimwear personality and sensuality in just a few well-made frames.

But boy, when you have to start name-dropping animators to explain why a beach party movie isn't an utter morass of boring, stupid jokes and junky sex humor, that alone tells us the crushing scale of the failure involved, y'know?

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL

The horror genre was at, perhaps, its all-time low in the early 1990s, and in Canada just as in the U.S. that means it was time for direct-to-video shlock to muscle its way in. Thus we arrive at Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which is as cheap and as horrendously acted as you'd ever want a DTV movie released in 1990 to be. Though as befit its country of origin, always anxious to do things just a little bit more oddly than the soulless Yanks with their cash-in approach to genre films, The Last Kiss is actually a damn sight weirder and more ambitious - though surely no more successful - than virtually anything else you're likely to encounter from the same year.

Before we get into that, let's start with the simple but, contextually, surprising fact that The Last Kiss, uniquely among Prom Night movies, is something like an actual sequel to one of the other films in the franchise. It doesn't in any way continue the story of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II - and it's not remotely connected to the original 1980 Prom Night - but it makes specific reference to some of the events of that film, and the titular Mary Lou Maloney even returns, though she's now being played by one Courtney Taylor, who I can't rightly call a trade up or a trade down from Lisa Schrage, except in that she feels like a totally different character now. Given that she is a vengeance-driven poltergeist "character" is likely the wrong word to be using in the first place.

Anyway, it's an indefinite time after the Hamilton High School gym was destroyed on prom night, and the spirit of long-dead prom queen Mary Lou sent back to her hell dimension, which we get to see now in the film's opening scene, and boy, is it ever a loopy one. Basically, Hell in The Last Kiss is a place where manacled women in torn nylon stockings do aerobics for all eternity, and I didn't make up a goddamn word of that, I promise you. Mary Lou is having none of this, so she breaks her chains with a nail file and escapes to Hamilton High, where her first act is to use a spectral jukebox to electrocute janitor Jack (Terry Doyle), who was there the night in 1957 when she burned to death. I didn't make up a goddamn word of that, either.

I'm going to skip ahead a bit, and reveal that The Last Kiss is a comedy. A horror-comedy, nominally, but you know how these things go: either the balance is too much towards horror, and the jokes are all pitch-black and meanspirited, or the balance is too much towards comedy, and it basically becomes a farce with gross-out death scenes. The Last Kiss decides, very early, that it's going to be a comedy with a marginal amount of horror, and it never once looks back. This is to its benefit in at least one regard: the gore effects, which are laughably unpersuasive and overdetermined, work on at least some legitimate level when we're plainly not supposed to take any of them seriously, and so when a man is gutted and filled with banana split fixins, this is a "joke", and not just a terrible, terrible, ill-executed attempt at a cruelly comic slasher killing.

The flipside is that, if you're going to make your horror-comedy a straight-up comedy, you need to be absolutely certain that the comedy is funny. For bad horror, like most bad filmmaking, can have its own magnetism and charm; but bad comedy by definition doesn't, since you cannot laugh at bad comedy. The Last Kiss isn't, by any means, reprehensibly bad comedy, but it only has a few different ideas for jokes, and it recycles these endlessly until its final act comes along, the film essentially says "fuck it", and the surrealist absurdity starts in earnest. Which is a mode that works out a lot better the comedy does.

What happens after Mary Lou's resurrection is thus: she haunts about, looking for someone to latch onto, and find him in the form of Alex Grey (Tim Conlon). Considering that this is junk on two separate levels (insincere horror-comedy and bargain basement 1990s genre fair), it's genuinely astonishing how much effort The Last Kiss puts into building up Alex's character, positing him as torn between his best friend, the geek slacker Shane (David Stratton), and his girlfriend of precisely one year, Sarah (Cynthia Preston, going in those days as Cyndy). Neither Shane nor Sarah, it should be noted, get anything like Alex's depth of character: Shane is just a vaguely-defined "the male world that you are abandoning because of your love life", while Sarah, though given more traits, never emerges as anything but a nag, the dullest kind of stock character girlfriend, and all the more frustrating because the movie honestly expects that we're invested enough in her as a person that we'll buy it when she turns into the hero of the final sequence, or that we'll see it as tragic when she starts to lose Alex for reasons beyond her comprehension. She's just a space-filler, and not remotely up to the task of being a legitimate Other Woman to the vengeance ghost.

After Alex and Sarah have the latest of their frequent micro-fights, Alex goes to school to pick up some books, and there he meets - and sleeps with - Mary Lou's ghost, right on top of an American flag. The score, blaring forth with "The Star-Spangled Banner", takes this to be ironic in some way that the rest of the movie isn't kenning. This turns out to be the beginning of the end for Alex: he immediately starts to see and hear Mary Lou everywhere, quickly putting two and two together and coming up with "dead prom queen"; Mary Lou, for her part, is so anxious that her new fleshy boyfriend should survive and succeed that she begins to manipulate the world to improve his grades and sports career, killing anybody who stands too much in the way. Confused as to what else he can do, Alex buries the bodies and ask Mary Lou not to do it again. Rinse, repeat.

Alex, as I've said, is an unusually complex figure for a movie of this sort; Mary Lou, on the other hand, is not, and that proves fatal for any chance that The Last Kiss will work the way it wants to, since she is our designated Murderous Quipster Ghost, a veritable female Freddy Krueger without the idiosyncracies that make it vaguely tolerable when Freddy does his bloody stand-up routine. The more she spouts off lines that are plainly written as gags, but divorced from a credible personality or a performance that gives the illusion of personality, they all fall flat, and as the movie enters its damnably repetitious phase, where the same bickering between Alex and Mary Lou occurs three or four or hell, I don't know, 15 separate times, even the remotest goodwill that the movie's weirdness might have generated burns off, replaced by annoyance and boredom. In the meantime, comic business around the edges - notably an ironic intercom system straight out of M*A*S*H, or at least its community-theater equivalent - manages to also not be very funny, though at least it comes closer than Mary Lou's endless, arid bantering.

The Last Kiss falls into a chasm between being, on the one side, too frivolous and unserious about its content to be remotely compelling as a story in its own right, and being, on the other side, too labored and irritating to have the high spirit needed to justify being so damn frivolous. And it is a tedious film as a result. Oh! there is nothing as grating as wacky comedy that isn't landing - and comedy being so personal, I am not surprised that The Last Kiss enjoys as cult following. But it must be an awfully insular cult, to enjoy what directors Ron Oliver and Peter R. Simpson (the former wrote the screenplay) are doing in their non-scary, unfunny horror-comedy, in which absolutely nothing is credible but Alex and Conlon's charismatically clueless approach to playing him (imagine somebody with more heart than talent doing a Ferris Bueller impression; you are most of the way there), and that's simply not enough to keep the movie interesting or entertaining.

Until, that is, the finale: Alex and Mary Lou and Sarah in a chase scene through the film's rinky-dink iteration of Hell, no longer an aerobics class but a nightmare version of Hamilton High itself. The movie has always been distinctly off-kilter; but here, and only here, it becomes outright weird, and suddenly turns into something fascinating and mesmerising to watch. Characters we've seen die appear as sarcastic zombie versions of themselves, and the set design goes from shamefully trying to look plusher than it is to proudly turning the film's low budget into a strength, as it commits to look and feel like a haunted house put on by volunteers. And there's a flamethrower that literally just appears in the space of a cut. It's daft as hell, but at least it has the "wait, what am I looking at?" feeling that, presumably, the whole movie was meant to be playing with, and if that doesn't quite make it actually good, or actually interesting, at least it's compelling, and that's more than the rest of the movie can say. This is strange as all hell, but only the last 15 minutes are actually strange in a fun way; the rest is just tetchy zaniness and not even a little bit enjoyable, on any level.

Body Count: 7, not counting one mentioned in an offscreen joke, nor the spirits of the damned.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

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TIM AT TFE: GHOSTS OF SUMMERS PAST

This week's essay: three recent summer movie seasons proving that 2013 wasn't as bad as all that.

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GREAT MOMENTS WITH MR. GAINES

It would be a lie if I said that Lee Daniels' The Buter was "bad": it is good, or at least within good's wheelhouse. But it's certainly not good in the way that I, for one, was hoping for, and considering the (legally-mandated) possessive right there in the title, is is less of what history has conditioned us to expect from "A Lee Daniels Film" than anything that director has ever made. Lee Daniels' The Butler is in fact awfully generic, as a story and as a visual experience, and neither of these things have been true in any way of Daniel's squalid exercises in high-energy trash and tubthumping; the gloriously misguided Shadowboxer, the high-speed oscillations between grotty realism and overheated melodrama in Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, and my personal favorite, the florid Southern exploitation film The Paperboy. Also, the fact that I just attached the description "personal favorite" to The Paperboy can be rightfully considered my full disclosure for the rest of the review.

Lee Daniels' The Butler is, basically, a film with its heart very clearly in the right place, and its imagination left behind in a locked root cellar - it is very much Civil Rights Edition Forrest Gump. Not quite so cloying as that, maybe, but as far as plot goes, it feels exactly like something you've seen before, and given the setting, the actors, and the filmmaker, there's no way that isn't disappointing.

The film tells the life story of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a condensed, fictionalised figure who, after a fashion, stands in for all the African-American men who served as butlers at the White House in the post-war 20th Century; he also, after a fashion, stands in for the totality of the 20th Century African-American experience, which is one of the places that that the movie causes undue trouble for itself. The son of sharecroppers whose father was brutally killed by a savage, rapey white landowner in 1926, Cecil clambered his way up the domestic servitude ladder, eventually ending up with a wonderful wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and two sons in Washington, D.C., where he caught the attention of the White House, and hired onto that establishment's elite staff of servants, a role where he toiled through eight presidencies and the most turbulent decades in the entire history of black America. Because of the story it's telling, there's probably no way that Lee Daniels' The Butler could have ever been "elegant", but it surely didn't need to turn out as mechanically schematic as it did, with Cecil's elder son Louis (David Oyelowo), deeply opposed to his father's studied apoliticism, getting involved with activist politics and managing in the process to be present at just about every key moment of the civil rights movement from 1960 onwards from the reasonable (the lunch-counter sit-in at Greensboro, NC) to the fucking absurd (he was in the hotel room when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated), so it's actually he, not his father, who fills the Forrest Gump role, though Cecil is the one interacting with presidents. A mixture, then.

The film's need to play as a Greatest Hits of the civil rights movement inevitably makes the film clunk along from one scene to another, though in its defense, I must say that screenwriter Danny Strong does a better job of stitching moments together than Gump scribe Eric Roth does in any of his "one man's life throughout history" scripts. Not enough to make the film seem organic; Lee Daniels' The Butler sputters rather than flows, and while the film's various designers do a good job of using costume and setting to indicate the passage of time, the story's chronology is awfully murky in ways that do it no good. It's a real damn biopic, in the end, not so much a story as a collection of moments, failing to build up momentum as a narrative or as a message movie, though Daniels tries his very hardest to keep pushing the whole messy project in a contained direction, whose end point is "...and then there was the Obama presidency".

No doubt about, the film's themes are worthy of exploration, and given the paucity of films the stare history right in the face and attack the United States' history of racial oppression from the point of view of African-American storytellers, it is unquestionably a film of considered social and political value: I have no idea what the film imagines its target audience to be, but as a white person with a very dim opinion of how white people, as a class, deal with non-white people, I found the film's unapologetic tone of "fuck you, racist whites, you have done terrible things" to be an exciting contrast to the vast corpus of American films about racism, which are always a bit too self-congratulatory about how "we" (and we are always, oddly, pink-skinned in these settings) are better than those nasty backwards rednecks. But that doesn't make it a better work of drama, just a potent message picture. And who the hell goes out to the movies because they want a real rock-solid message picture? Nobody you'd want to talk to at a cocktail party, that's for sure.

Daniels's limited creative energy doesn't help: not only is it the most programmatic script he's ever worked with, his directing is muted and uninvolving, not ineffective so much as it is bland, and this makes the scripts problems rise to the fore, whereas the director of Precious and The Paperboy tended to make those scripts' flaws more invisible. Only twice does Daniels do something truly impressive and florid: once, in contrasting the execution of a White House state dinner with the lunch counter sit-ins, itself a schematic choice that the director (and editor Joe Klotz) manages to put over through the collision of graphic elements, giving it a visual energy that the film otherwise lacks, while a Ku Klux Klan attack a bit later is staged exactly like a horror movie, as cinematographer Andrew Dunn indulges in foggy chiaroscuro and the blocking feels much more "Jason Voorhees" than "racial suprecmacists" - the brashest part of the movie and the best, since it is the one that is most overt about how much it straight-up despises racism, without any handwringing or "let's see both sides" nonsense.

Still, two scenes in a 132-minute film is hardly anything, and what ends up making Lee Daniels' The Butler work at all - and even so, it only works by the barest margin - are the three main actors, Whitaker, Winfrey, and Oyelowo, all giving totally commanding, complex performances (and standing out magnificently from the cornucopia of distracting cameos, including a wordless Mariah Carey as Cecil's mentally unhinged mother, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, and James Marsden as a watered-down cartoon Boston accent sitting in the Oval Office while the real John Kennedy is off fucking movie stars), each in a slightly different register, but marshaled by their director - always great with actors - into a unified, tripartite whole. Winfrey, acting for the first time in 15 years (if we don't count voice work) gets the showiest and certainly the most fun role, finding the exact right note between physically performing her character's frustrations and sexual urges while vocally leaving off at a much lighter Sassy Black Woman level that never feels as clichéd as that stock type usually does; but even as great as her life-force is, and Oyelowo's tense, vibrating rage, it's Whitaker who gives the film its most complicated performance, as a man who tells us that he wears two faces, but doesn't realise himself that he has, in fact, three faces, and the struggle between implacable manservant to absent-minded whites, proud and conservative family man, and African-American male who has seen horrible things but is terrified of the upheaval that would come from challenging them, is played out entirely beneath the surface of Whitaker's endlessly mutable face. It is a rich performance, and a subtle one, and one that makes Cecil far more interesting than the script does; and that's in addition to Whitaker's extraordinary ability to handle both the requirements of playing a specific man and a Stand-In For a People.

By itself, Whitaker's performance is reason enough to be glad that Lee Daniels' The Butler exists, though not enough to be out-and-out enthusiastic about it. It's still an awfully sullen and hushed movie with a painfully modular approach to scene structure, and there is no crackle of energy, just subdued, respectful blandness. Lord knows there are worse Serious Message Pictures out there, and this one has the benefit of an especially worthy message, but it lacks spark. And spark is the one thing that every other Lee Daniels film has had most of all, so its absence here is particularly noticeable.

6/10

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