THE GRUDGE: How To End A Career Before It Begins

Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland. Directed by Takashi Shimizu. (2004, 92 min)

The Grudge provided positive proof that just because you have a college education doesn’t mean you are smart.

I’m a middle school teacher in the real world, and like any job, sometimes it's necessary to take a day off for an appointment, running my kids to the dentist or having the house to myself so I can crank-up some Metallica and play air-guitar in my underwear. But unlike most jobs, a teacher’s duties do not stop because you need a day off, so we must arrange for a sub to come and fill-in.

Seems simple enough, right? But it isn’t as easy as that. You have hire the sub yourself through an automated online system, prepare detailed lesson plans in advance and pray your students go easy on whoever shows up; it is amazing how many middle school kids think sub days give them permission to act like shitstains without fear of repercussion. One thing I can’t stand is the attitude that subs aren’t real teachers. They are, and almost all of them begin their career by subbing until they can secure themselves a permanent position. It’s hard work, and not always financially secure; unless it is a long-term gig, you don’t really know from one day to the next how often you’ll be working. Kids do not have the right to make the job harder, but they often do anyway.

On the other hand, while it’s unfair to be subjected to rotten behavior from children, a lot of subs tend to encourage such errant behavior themselves.

Not to belittle the job, but substitute teaching is essentially glorified babysitting. You are required to follow established lesson plans, remind students of their tasks and make sure they follow through. Seldom is actual teaching involved. Most of the time, the subs I’ve hired do that job well.

But every now and then, I’ve gotten some subs who have no business being in a classroom. Some have come in and totally ignored my lesson plans and taught their own (even if totally unrelated to whatever unit we were in the middle of), some have used the period to establish themselves as one of the ‘cool’ teachers who lets kids do what they want, some have come in with an agenda totally unrelated to public education at all (such as one genius who came in and lectured why we should all be more tolerant of transgender individuals).

Then there are those whose very appearance guarantees little will be accomplished. I once had a sub so androgynous that even my colleagues had no idea if the individual was a he or she. Another young lady showed up dressed in a mini-skirt, high-heels and fishnet leggings, boobs threatening to burst from her blouse. Another sandled hipster decided it was perfectly okay to sit at my desk, prop his feet up and cut his toenails. Remember, this is a classroom of 12 and 13 year olds, who are a lot like the elderly...anything which deviates from the norm throws their world into turmoil.

Most of the aforementioned substitutes were young and fresh-out-of-college, with little or no experience even being around middle-schoolers, much less knowing how they think. Unless you are LeBron James or Lady GaGa, they do not think any adults are cool. If you are an educator, no matter how you act, what you let them get away with or how sexy you dress, they do not want to be your buddy.

But that didn’t stop one sub from doing the dumbest thing I’d ever seen an educator do in my classroom. Not only did she have a misguided sense of mutual trust with my class, she pretty-much screwed herself out of ever teaching in the Portland metropolitan area. After arranging a day off to release my inner James Hetfield, our sub-finding system selected this young woman, who’d just recently graduated from Portland State University. My lesson plans were simple: As a reward for completion of a previously-assigned Narrative Writing Assessment, I planned to show The Sandlot, a fine little family film which featured narrative similar to the work they had just finished. All the sub had to do was push play and call it a day.

But, no, this particular teacher was one of those under the misguided impression that her job was to establish how hip she was. When several kids groaned at the idea of sitting through a family film like The Sandlot, she apparently asked the class what they’d rather do. One of my students responded by saying he had a DVD of The Grudge in his locker.

The Grudge is an American remake of a popular Japanese horror film. Starting with The Ring, there was a brief-but-huge trend of adapting Japanese ghost stories for American audiences. The Ring remains the only truly good one, but The Grudge was pretty successful, spawning two sequels. Personally, I thought the movie was derivative and boring, but it was extremely popular with teenagers. Although rated PG-13 in theaters, it was released on DVD in an unrated version, which is what my student had in his locker.

My sub apparently agreed to let the class watch The Grudge instead, as long as everyone promised to keep it a secret. As rationally-thinking beings, I’ll bet you just came up with two immediate reasons why this was a stupid idea...

First, teaching is one profession that's under constant scrutiny by the public in general. The slightest slip-up in the classroom can result in angry parents screaming for your head. Of course I know that most of the kids in my class grow up being allowed to watch stuff like Saw or The Hangover. At the same time, however, I’ve previously been forced to change the name of one of my independent reading units, “Stories of Mystery and Fear,” to the less-threatening “Weird Tales,” simply because a few conservative and religious parents objected. You also need to remember that, as a middle school teacher, I am not allowed to show any movie with a rating beyond PG without first clearing it with both the school’s administrators and every single parent whose kids are in my classroom.

Second, and even stupider, this supposedly-intelligent substitute teacher actually trusted a classroom of 30 kids to keep this a secret. Did she just land on Earth from Planet Stupidia? When I returned to school the next day, standing in the hall before class started, what do you think was the first thing at-least a dozen students said when they saw me?

13-year-old kids don’t give a shit about honoring the trust of some grown-up they just met, no matter how cool they may be.

During the course of the day, both me and my principal were inundated with angry phone calls from parents, understandably upset that a teacher would subject their kids to such horrors without being given permission. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some conservative fuddy-duddy; I often sit with my eight-year-old daughter to view all kinds of cinematic horror. But watching those films with my own kid was my decision, based on what I knew she was ready for. I still wouldn’t want her school to make the same decision without checking with me first.

But my substitute, in an effort to be the so-called ‘cool teacher’, ignored all that and stupidly assumed every one of the students was hip to her plan.

Well, I doubt it was worth it, because after this incident she was removed from the sub lists of at least four school districts in the Portland area, which in-turn precluded her from being seriously considered for any kind of permanent teaching position.

I do not know whether or not my former sub is permanently employed right now, but I do know that spending six years in college and tens-of-thousands of dollars to earn a degree doesn’t automatically make one smarter. This lady screwed herself over a freaking movie. And you know, what’s truly sad is that all this hubbub was over such a shitty movie like The Grudge. I mean, if I was going to throw away my career over a horror movie, I would have at least chosen a film more worth throwing it away over, like, Psycho or The Exorcist.

HEAVY METAL: The Chemically-Dependent Cartoon

Featuring the voices of John Candy, Harold Ramis, John Vernon, Eugene Levy, Jackie Burroughs, Marilyn Lightstone. Directed by Gerald Potterton. (1981, 91 min.)

Ever watch a movie when you were a kid and thought it was uber-awesome, then revisit it years later and think, “Wow, that movie’s actually pretty shitty,” and you’re almost ashamed to admit you once liked it? For me, one of those movies is 1981’s Heavy Metal.

There are a couple of important details the uninitiated need to know about this film before we go any further...

First, Heavy Metal is an animated sci-fi anthology film featuring stories based on a popular adult comic book originally published in France. Right now, some of you might be retorting, “Heavy Metal is not a comic book. It is an adult illustrated fantasy magazine...from France.”

Really? Aside from the blood, gore, sex and female characters sporting boobs the size and texture of bowling balls, what’s the difference in the mode of storytelling between Heavy Metal and Archie? Besides the price per issue, that is. No, Heavy Metal is a comic book. A grown-up comic book, perhaps, one lonely guys might even masturbate to, but still just a comic book.

And what’s wrong with something being labeled a comic book, anyway? When did ‘comic book’ become such a four-letter word? Even today, if you’re of a certain age and do not want to be perceived as a maturity-stunted loser, you tend to defend your choice of printed entertainment as a graphic novel or Manga...anything but a comic book. Comic books are for little kids.

You know what? I still enjoy playing with Lego’s on occasion, but you don’t hear me referring to them as ‘simulated architecture.’ Besides, ‘graphic novel’ is simply a more eloquent way of saying ‘really expensive comic book’. As for Manga, the official Japanese definition is ‘really expensive black & white comic book that you have to read backwards.’ Folks, there’s nothing wrong with reading comic books as an adult. You do not need to justify it by calling it something else.

Second, the title has nothing to do with the heavy metal music genre, even though the ‘metal’ soundtrack (which blasted from almost everyone’s car that summer in 1981) was a major promotional tool for the film, featuring songs by numerous bands popular at the time. While it is obvious the filmmakers thought it fitting that a film called Heavy Metal should include songs from metal artists (admittedly a great gimmick), of all the artists who contributed songs for the soundtrack, only two (Black Sabbath & Blue Oyster Cult) could actually be considered metal bands. Okay, you could stretch it and include Sammy Hagar, only because he performs the most ass-kicking song in the movie. But Grand Funk? Don Felder (the guy from The Eagles)? Stevie Nicks? Devo? Journey? Jesus Christ, Journey is to heavy metal what Will Smith is to Gangsta Rap. They were the fucking Nickelback of the 80s.

I gotta admit, the list of music artists (who didn't love Stevie Nicks back then?) was a major factor in me wanting to see this movie, which was somewhat disappointing when I finally watched it. Most of these songs are buried so far down in the mix that their inclusion is perfunctory, even when later remastered for video and DVD. The songs are almost randomly inserted into the film and sound shitty, like they're being played through a transistor radio. I’m not a big fan of disco (in fact, I hate it), but at least the tunes in Saturday Night Fever were prominently featured and added auditory oomph to many scenes. I learned a valuable lesson the night I went to see Heavy Metal: do not choose a movie because you wanna hear songs. That’s what records were for.

Still, at the time, I thought the movie was great, partially because this was an adult animated film, but mainly because I was pretty stoned at the time. Which brings me to the third important detail about this film, and the key to whether or not anyone will enjoy it thirty years after its release: Heavy Metal is only good if you are high.

I went on a double-date to see the movie back in high school, and we all got pretty baked in the theater parking lot beforehand...a good idea for a movie like this, a bad idea for my relationship with my girlfriend, who was almost abnormally jealous. She didn’t even want me looking at another girl. If my eyes were simply cast in the general direction of perceived female competition, she’d throw a hissy-fit. I never realized how extreme her possessiveness was until we watched Heavy Metal, when she stormed out of the theater halfway through because she thought I was getting off on the animated boobs (of which there are plenty). Even though well-snockered, I followed to reassure her that her worries were unwarranted, mainly because, while my girlfriend’s boobs weren’t as epic and spherical as those adorning the animated tarts in Heavy Metal, I still wanted to touch them later that night. Too bad we had this little spat at that moment because, while I was groveling in the theater lobby, I missed the one truly good segment in the film, when a WW2 bomber is overrun by zombies and is forced to crash-land on an island, also overrun by zombies. Even though me and my girlfriend were both pretty messed up, I was able convince her that she was the only woman for me, animated or other wise.

At least her brief tantrum didn’t ruin my high, which made me love the film at the time. For years afterwards I ballyhooed how great it was to others who hadn’t yet experienced it, which they couldn’t easily do because it was 15 years before Heavy Metal became available on video. This was because it took forever to reacquire the rights to use all the original songs from the soundtrack (ironic, since they have no impact of the narrative). Its long absence on home video merely added to the film’s mystique. Sure, it occasionally ran on HBO (which I didn’t have) in the middle of the night, but other than that, Heavy Metal was the title most movie geeks were salivating over to include in their video collection.

In 1996, the long wait was over. Heavy Metal came out on VHS and I snapped up my copy the day it was released. By this time, I was 33, married for the second time and had my first daughter. Partying and drugs were part of my past, which I had long disassociated from my fond memory of this film. I just remembered it being a colorful and violent fantasy. And I assured my wife, a fantasy lover her whole life, that she’d really enjoy it as well.

We sat down to watch it that night, and it was less than five minutes into the film that I noticed two things:

• The animation is shitty, on par with some kind of film school project. There’s also a lot of Rotoscoping (artists tracing over live action), one of several reasons I hate Ralph Bakshi’s movies. The animation in Heavy Metal makes Saturday morning cartoons look like Pixar.
• The soundtrack still sounds terrible. Not a single attempt was made to boost the music more prominently into the audio mix.

And that’s just the look and sound. It only gets worse.

For the most part, the stories are simplistic and stupid, clumsily linked by the recurring appearance of an evil, glowing orb called the Loc-Nar, with god-awful dialogue and one-dimensional characters, none of whom you’ll give a shit about. Almost every story features either tons of gory violence, pandering drug humor (like the producers knew most the audience would be stoned) or impossibly voluptuous female characters, nearly all whom end up naked at some point. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy gratuitous sex and violence as much as the next guy, but in Heavy Metal, it's like watching the fantasies of a 13-year-old. In fact, one of the stories is a fantasy about a 13-year-old, suddenly transformed a lean fighting machine who also screws every woman in sight.

I think it was during the second or third story that my wife looked over at me, raised an eyebrow and said, “You actually like this?”

Suddenly defensive, I told her to give the movie a chance. It might get better. But was I trying to reassure her or myself? This was a movie I’d been championing for over a decade, but not the one I remembered in my inebriated state 15 years before. Interestingly, the aforementioned bomber/zombie segment, which I missed while patching things up with my girlfriend, is the only part of the movie which is still truly effective and creepy.

While I was happy my wife wasn’t too concerned whether or not I was digging the animated boobs, this was where her idea of fantasy differed somewhat than mine. Later on, she said “Looks like whoever drew these women were getting off on their own pictures.”

And she's right. Watching this movie today, one gets the impression the artists really were getting off on their own drawings. This tells me two things. First, that the staff hired to illustrate the movie are all heterosexuals, because every female character has a body you could bounce a quarter off of, making the bikini-clad babes of Baywatch look like contestants on The Biggest Loser, while most of the males are hideous monsters or comedic caricatures. Second, that these guys may be some of the greatest illustrators of all time, since it must take a phenomenally steady hand to draw such glorious female body parts while your other hand is busy. I don’t think that was ever a problem over at Disney (well...maybe for the guys who drew Jessica Rabbit).

Anyway, for a supposed adult cartoon, Heavy Metal is crude, sophomoric and incredibly dumb, even for its time. Today, we may chuckle at the absurdity of 80’s relics like Top Gun, Rambo, Highlander or Footloose. But while those movies may not have aged too well, they were great for their time. I can still watch most of those and enjoy them for cinema kitsch that they are. I can’t do that with Heavy Metal, which was only good in 1981 because I was 17 and stoned. Today, it’s simply a bad movie, and not even in a fun way.

Still, Heavy Metal has its fans. But I’d like to know just how many of those folks have watched it recently, without the aid of narcotics.

LOGAN'S RUN: A Cow's Life

Starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, Farrah-Fawcett. Directed by Michael Anderson. (1976, 119 min.)

If you could be reincarnated as any animal, what would it be? 

I've had this conversation on numerous occasions in the past, with my kids on long drives to grandma's house, or during my college years, hanging around the dorm on weekends with chemically-altered friends. My answer has always been the same.

I would come back as a cow.

During those hazy college days, someone would inevitably scoff and say, "A cow? But they're stupid, smelly and live just to be slaughtered." Then they'd try to convince me of the awesome life of a predator like a shark or wolf, or a majestic creature like a whale or elephant, or a housepet living in a loving home. But it was always easy to point out why those choices suck.

First of all, most predators are also prey. I'd hate going through life knowing that each day there was a good chance of ending up in another animal's mouth. And even if you’re a wolf or the biggest Great White in the ocean, you have to deal with gung-ho poachers or pissed-off farmers avenging their sheep, not to mention your life depends on a steady diet of smaller animals to catch and kill, many of which are usually faster than you.

A majestic animal? Sure, we all love whales. But do you really think they swim around basking in the knowledge of how wonderful they are? Then there are the whalers worldwide looking to shove a harpoon up your ass. No thanks.

Yeah, on the surface, being a pampered pet sounds like an awesome life, until you realize the first thing your owners usually do is whack your nuts off. You get no say in the matter. And it would be even worse if you were a dog, because you'd spend most of your life waiting...waiting for food, waiting for walkies, waiting to pee, waiting for master to return home. It's that last point which kills it for me, especially after I recently read an article by a veterinary expert who writes that the reason dogs are so excited to see you again is because, each and every time you leave them behind, they think you are never coming back. Dogs suffer from permanent separation anxiety. Since reading that article, I'm plagued with guilt every time I head off to work, seeing my dog Murphy peering out at me through the window with eyes the size of the moon.

Come back as a dog? Fuck that.

No...a cow's life is the life for me. A short life, to be sure, but during my time on this mortal coil, I'd have absolutely no responsibilities. I wander around a field all day and someone else gives me all the food and shelter I need. Granted, I'd be clomping around in my own filth most of the time, but hell, I do that now anyway. All cows generally do is sleep and eat and make more cows. Sleep, eat and mate...aren't those the very activities a majority of people enjoy the most? Why not condense them into just a few glorious years of real living? And absolutely no mid-life crisis!

What's that you say? Time for slaughter? Well, let's see...I've roamed the meadow a thousand times, tapped every female in the herd at least once and gorged myself every day at feeding time my entire life. Yep...I guess I've done it all. Bring on the bolt pistol.

My argument even managed to convince one of my college friends, a new-age chick who enjoyed listening to CDs of whalesong, that life as a cow would be far cooler than life as a humpback.

By that same reckoning, according to Logan's Run, our future’s gonna be cool, too. You live in a massive domed city, protected from the outside world. You get to hang around in your pajamas, dial up free sex with your remote control, indulge in mind-altering chemicals and basically have fun your entire life while a super-computer does all the work. For further entertainment, you can go to an arena to watch other people explode. Sure, you’re about as educated as the average cow, but so what? Do you really care about the meaning of existence when you can get your wing-wang squeezed whenever you want?

Of course, the population must be kept in check, so you must die when you turn thirty. But, like the cows oblivious to their own mortality right up to the moment when they're tagged in the head at a slaughterhouse, the blissfully stupid inhabitants of this paradise have no concept of death; they think they’re being 'renewed' in a fiery ritual called Carousel (where the aforementioned human combustion takes place each day). Personally, I wouldn’t care if there was no renewel. If you got to spend thirty years of your life indulging in your every whim, isn’t that better than 80 years of working your ass off, only to end up in a nursing home with no control over your own bowels?

But some of the folks in Logan’s Run want to turn 31 and try to run away. That’s when guys like Logan (Michael York) step in. Logan is a Sandman, whose job it is to track down and kill runners (if I were Logan, I'd be a little pissed to be stuck with an actual job while everyone else gets to spend their days getting high and banging each other). A few runners have managed to actually escape over the years, so the central computer instructs Logan to pose as a runner, seek out and destroy a place called Sanctuary, a refuge for runners which allegedly exists outside the dome. Accompanying him is Jessica (Jenny Agutter), who still has a lot of years left, but is so charmed by Logan she doesn’t want to leave his side (I’m not sure why, since Logan’s an egocentric douchebag through most of the picture). On their trail is another Sandman, Logan’s former buddy, Francis (Richard Jordan), who’s trying to kill them every step of the way.

Once outside the city, Logan and Jessica make their way to the ivy-laden ruins of Washington D.C. (an improvement over how the town looks today). It's here they meet an old man (Peter Ustinov, actually billed as 'Old Man') and realize it's possible to grow old and spend the rest of your life with someone you love (yeah, because getting old is so fucking awesome). Suddenly enlightened, they decide to go back to the domed city and free its citizens of a horrible existence of recreation and endless sex.

I know we‘re supposed to root for Logan and Jessica, but at this point I really wanted Francis to blow them away. Instead, after Logan is captured, the central computer taps into his mind and becomes so confused the whole city starts to explode. Supposedly, it’s because the computer can’t accept there’s no Sanctuary. It certainly isn’t because of Logan’s own brainpower, since he doesn’t demonstrate an iota of smarts during the entire movie. Maybe the poor computer stumbled upon the previous nauseating scene when Logan and Jessica learn what marriage is and suddenly decide to be married. Still, whatever the reason, it doesn’t explain why a whole city would go up in flames. I've done a lot of things that confused my own computer and not once did it try to burn my house down

Logan's Run is a silly big-budget bastardization of William Nolan’s and George Clayton Johnson’s much darker novel. Despite the unique premise, the script is on par with a rejected Star Trek episode - these people really are stupid, as demonstrated during an awful scene when Logan and Jessica see the sun for the first time and don’t know what the hell it is. Plus, the romantic chemistry between these two is as engaging as watching otters mate. Most of the effort is put into the admittedly great production design, as well as an elaborate miniature set of the city itself. It still looks like a model, but it’s fun to take in all the details, the same way it’s fun to marvel at doll houses. The filmmakers must have been proud of it, too, because when the story calls for the city to be destroyed, they just can’t bring themselves to do it. Instead, we see strategically placed showers of sparks, along with holographic effects superimposed over scenes of people running in panic. We never actually get to see anything crumble, topple or explode. The visual effects won an Oscar, but not even a year later, Star Wars came along and made Logan's Run look like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

In the end, thanks to Logan, everyone is free from their living hell of non-stop luxury and can now fend for themselves, like a once-loved housepet that owners unceremoniously leave behind when they move away.

Just one more reason I’d rather be reincarnated as a cow.

AVATAR: What "Meh" Was Created For

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez. Directed by James Cameron. (2009, 162 min.)

Meh.

Yeah, yeah, I know...it's the biggest movie of the decade, biggest of all time. But Gone with the Wind might have been too, if they charged fourteen bucks a ticket back in 1939. Yeah, the giant  Smurfs are cool looking and the special effects are incredible. Once again, director James Cameron has pushed filmmaking technology to its limits. Visually, Avatar makes his last movie, Titanic, look like Mega-shark vs. Giant Octopus.

Still...meh.

Of course, I had to see it. We all had to. If nothing else, just to see what kind of film costs as much money as it would take to solve the educational budget problems of an entire state. While I don't usually give in to hype, this is James Cameron we're talking about, whose movies have always been pretty damn cool. And, of course, his groundbreaking use of 3-D has to be seen to be believed. But what am I saying? You know that, because you saw it.
We all did.

Still...meh.

Walking out of the theater after nearly three hours, the first thing I thought wasn't how awesome it was, but the painful throbbing in my ass. Actually, I was thinking that only 90 minutes into the thing, and it had nothing to do with the theater seats. I've sat through longer movies (The Green Mile, JFK, The Right Stuff, Titanic, Grindhouse, even a re-release of The Great Escape at a revival house, even though I already had it on DVD). But those were interesting enough to keep my mind off my posterior. Cheaper, too.

I know I'm in the minority regarding my meh-assessment of Avatar. Almost everyone I know declared how great it was, how astounding the effects were, how incredible the 3-D was.

And it isn't a bad movie. I didn't hate it or anything. Still, part of me wonders if some people felt obligated to love it because they had to sell one of their children to afford the ticket price, or were simply blown away by the admittedly-outstanding 3-D. Avatar is only the second 3-D film I've seen where the gimmick actually made the movie itself better.

The first one was in 1983, when Universal crapped all over its Jaws legacy by vomiting-forth Jaws 3-D. There isn't a person alive today willing to admit that movie was anything but an excuse to throw fake-looking body parts at the audience. But back then, in theaters, 3-D did make the film seem better than it really was, enough that we were willing to put up with the swelling headache (which felt like someone driving a corkscrew into your skull) we developed from wearing those cheap paper glasses. At least we weren't charged extra for the privilege.

But watching Jaws 3-D on TV a few years later, imaginatively retitled Jaws 3 because there was no 3-D TV back then, we saw the movie for the manure it really was. Even the special effects, which looked cool with glasses on, were so cheesy that it made the effects in the original Jaws look like...well, Avatar. I’m sure the producers didn’t mind, having scammed enough cash from us to justify Jaws: The Revenge, obviously green-lit by some misguided bonehead at Universal who assumed Jaws 3-D was successful because of its story. I’m certain that individual found himself unemployed soon after.

Avatar is not nearly as god-awful as Jaws 3-D. It is obvious that every bit of its third-world-nation-crippling budget is right up there on the screen. That’s all fine and good; it makes the film (in theaters) as fun as riding Splash Mountain at Disneyland. However, watching Avatar at home is like watching a YouTube video of someone else riding Splash Mountain. I’ve ridden Splash Mountain, and folks, a YouTube video is not Splash Mountain.

And it’s at home when you truly discover which movies are really worth watching a second time, when the story becomes more important. In the theater, I was blown away by Avatar’s incredible 3-D, at least until the point when my ass started to hurt and deja vu began to creep over me; I’d seen this movie before. And if you’ve ever seen Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas or Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, so have you. Avatar tells the exact same story. Critics and trolls have been saying the same thing for a few years now. But originality isn’t the problem. Granted, Avatar is far more technically brilliant than all of those films combined, but only if you see it in a theater, in 3-D.

Lack of originality doesn’t really bother me much. The Godfather wasn't the first gangster picture, either. And even though he’s hardly had an original creative idea of his own, I’m a big James Cameron fan. I loved The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies and Titanic, but admit Cameron has always been a thief or borrower. Harlan Ellison, a contentious sci-fi writer who claimed the story of The Terminator was lifted from a few of Ellison’s Outer Limits teleplays, threatened to sue; Aliens is a sequel to Ridley Scott’s classic; True Lies is a remake of the French film, La Totale; the sinking of Titanic had been depicted in at least a half-dozen other movies. Terminator 2 is a sequel to his first film. That leaves The Abyss as the only 100% original Cameron film (ironic, since it is the only movie of his career generally to be considered a failure).

Again...originality? No big deal. If a studio wants to give Cameron $300 million to make Dances with Smurfs, fine with me. If Cameron can make us all grip our armrests as the Titanic sinks, even though we already know it’s going to, that’s saying a lot about his storytelling skill. And say what you will about his enormous budgets; no matter how many peoples he kills, boats he sinks, shit he blows up and effects artists he employs, in the middle of those movies have been characters we cared about (even when they were cyborgs). This is the guy who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger a film career, who made everyone take female action heroes seriously, and even managed to make Tom Arnold funny.

But I didn't care about the story or any of the characters in Avatar, two feats Pocahontas managed to accomplish in half the time. To those of you who saw Avatar only once, in 3-D on a giant 50-foot-wide screen, tell me one single classic & iconic scene, a snippet of quotable dialogue or a memorable performance by any of the actors. Hell, can you even name a single character?

Was Avatar great because it was in 3-D, or was it a great movie that just happened to be in 3-D? Try watching it a second time on your television and convince yourself it’s is as great as you remember it in theaters.

For me anyway, a truly great film is one I can still can still repeatedly enjoy long after the opportunity to see it again in theaters is gone. Avatar doesn’t qualify. Seeing the it without all the bells and whistles confirmed what it really is, a movie by filmmaker more in love with pushing technological boundaries than telling a compelling or original story. Sounds like another genius who once made a great film a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Meh.

EARTHQUAKE: Take Off Your Pantyhose, Dammit!

Starring Charleton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Genevieve Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Marjoe Gortner. Directed by Mark Robson. (1974, 121 min)


“Sensurround” was a gimmick dreamed up in the 70s by Universal Pictures for their most successful entry in the 70s disaster movie sweepstakes, Earthquake. In theaters where the movie played, speakers the size of Volkswagens were installed in the back. During key scenes these speakers emitted a bass-heavy rumble, loud enough to (sort of) vibrate your seat as though you were experiencing the quake too, much like I used to experience my upstairs neighbor’s love of R. Kelly every weekend before I finally lost my mind and shot him. To this day, whenever I hear “I Believe I Can Fly,” I believe I can kill again.

Sensurround was one of those gimmicks that William Castle would have once concocted himself if he had the money. It ain’t some technological breakthrough - anyone with the same stereo system as my late, bullet-riddled neighbor can accomplish the same thing - but it’s an idea no one had thought of before. While today all movies are presented in Mega-Dolby-THX-5.1-Dodeccophonic-Digital-Thunder-Of-The-Gods-Christ-My-Ears-Are-Bleeding-Surround sound, back then there was only Sensurround, simply because someone thought to stick huge speakers at the back of the theater. Universal would use the gimmick for later films (Midway, Rollercoaster and Battlestar Galactica), but it was only really effective in Earthquake, when the idea was still new. That as much as anything helped make it a box office hit.

As for the movie itself, Earthquake assembles the usual all-star cast to wonder around and dig each other out of the rubble after a massive quake hits Los Angeles. Typical of most disaster movies, most of the principle actors are well past their prime, many of whom overact on an unparalleled level - you know you’re in for extreme William Shatner-style thespianism when Charleton Heston turns in one of the most low-keyed performances in the movie. George Kennedy is on-hand to pretty-much play the same guy he does in the Airport movies (this time as a hard-nosed cop); Ava Gardener is Heston’s bitter alcoholic old wife, who looks like that scary aunt in every family who reeks of cigarettes and Pond’s cold cream; Lorne Greene is cast as Gardener’s dad (!), who has either discovered the Fountain of Youth or conceived her when he was eight years old. Others along for the ride include Richard Roundtree as a motorcycle daredevil, Marjoe Gortner as an unhinged National Guardsman, Walter Matthau as the film’s comic relief, Genevieve Bujold as Heston’s mousy mistress, and Victoria Principal in her pre-Dallas days, sporting leather pants, a Get Christy Love afro and big knockers.

Of course, all these actors take a back seat to the true stars of the movie, the special effects team. There are two massive quakes during the film, and Los Angeles ends up pretty well wasted. Skyscrapers crumble, bridges collapse, a dam bursts, houses topple or explode; victims fall to their deaths, get crushed, blown up, broiled, drowned, or shot by Gortner (the film’s only real villain, and sporting a 'fro nearly as big as Victoria's). For the most part, the effects artists do a good job. Much of the destruction is pretty convincing even by modern standards, save for a few goofy scenes, such as when a cattle truck flies off of a crumbling bridge; though the truck topples a hundred feet to the ground, none of the anti-gravity cows fall out. Another scene shows passengers in a high-rise elevator falling to their deaths...we know they’ve hit the ground floor when a splotch of red paint is badly super-imposed over the shot. The traditional matte paintings showing the city in ruins may not be as convincing in this age of CGI, but I personally think they give those scenes a surreal look that's more effective than anything one of Michael Bay's current chronies can cook up with a laptop.

Earthquake at least deserves some kudos for being one of the few disaster movies with a fairly downbeat ending. A majority of the cast is dead by the time the credits roll, and the few who survive aren’t embracing each other, simply happy to be alive and with their loved ones. They are understandably shellshocked, dazed and confused. Earthquake is also the only time you’ll ever hear Lorne Greene roar, “Take off your panty hose, dammit!”

Imagine if he had yelled that on Bonanza.

THE TOWERING INFERNO: A Conspiracy Theory

Starring Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain & O.J. Simpson. Directed by John Guillermin & Irwin Allen (action sequences only). (1974, 165 min).

Essay by D.M. ANDERSON

The Towering Inferno is an important movie. Not just because it’s the quintessential disaster film of the 70s. Not just because it was the first truly ‘grown-up’ movie I was allowed to see without my parents tagging along (and I watched in horror at the decidedly non-Disney deaths of people in leisure suits going up in flames). Not because this movie was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. In fact, the ultimate historical importance of The Towering Inferno wouldn’t be felt for another 20 years, and then only by conspiracy theorists such as yours truly.

Like most people with a lot of spare time on their hands, I have a theory about what really went down during the O.J. Simpson trial (the former football star was accused of killing his wife and her lover). He didn’t get away with it because his dream team of lawyers did such a bang-up job in the courtroom, nor was it a lack of effort on the prosecution’s part. After all, they had overwhelming evidence pointing the finger right at him. No, O.J. Simpson got off because of The Towering Inferno, in which he has a supporting role as a security guard who takes the time to rescue a cat from a burning skyscraper. I have a sneaking suspicion that the jury, sitting in their hotel rooms after yet-another grueling day of listening to Johnny Cochran spout bad poetry (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”), punched up an on-demand service, and by a remarkable coincidence, the only film available was The Towering Inferno. Upon viewing this manipulatively tender moment halfway through the film, the jury came to the conclusion that nobody who’d take the time to save a cute little kitty could possibly carve up his ex-wife.

He saved a kitten! We be acquittin’!

Far-fetched, you say? Well, look at all those idiots (and they are legion) who refuse to even entertain the notion that Michael Jackson was guilty of child molestation, simply because he was so talented and wrote sensitive songs. Case-in-point...a few years ago, after discovering a fun website that allows you to make your own ’demotivational posters’, I made one which poked fun at Michael Jackson (yes, after he was dead). I got a lot of angry replies, including one which read:

Can any of you prove that Michael Jackson was a child molester, do you just take the perspective that the media sells to you, instead of thinking for yourself. Watch "This is It", listen to some of his songs, someone like that could NEVER be a child molester...He loved more than anything...he was a philanthropist if there ever was one...


By the way, the punctuation and sentencing errors above are those of the individual who wrote the reply, not mine. Anyway, this genius is convinced of the man’s innocence and offering his music as evidence. Even more amusing is the fact my demotivational poster never even mentioned Jackson’s child molestation charges - it was a jab at those who claim to be lifelong fans only after he died - yet this person immediately jumped to Jackson’s post-mortem defense. Apparently, so did the jurors in the Jackson case, who acquitted him of any wrongdoing, even though Jackson himself openly admitted seeing nothing wrong with sharing a bed with children.

So is it really that much of a stretch to speculate 12 O.J. jurors coming up with a similarly-asinine verdict, despite the mountain of evidence against him? Such a verdict certainly wasn’t based on his prowess on the gridiron or his amusing roles in The Naked Gun films. It was only in The Towering Inferno that O.J. displayed any kind of heartfelt sensitivity on par with Michael Jackson’s music.

You may argue my comparison is not valid. To that, I offer this scenario: the career of Tom Hanks. For all we know, the man is a total prick...wife beater, misogynist, on-the-set prima donna, killer of puppies. Hell, he might be one step away from going postal on everyone. But he is always a nice guy onscreen, so we automatically assume Hanks the actor and Hanks the man are one in the same. But none of us know him personally. Most of us have based our perception of Hanks on his ‘nice guy’ roles. Even in the movies where he’s sort-of a villain (Catch Me if You Can, That Thing You Do), we still like him. But let me ask you this...if Hanks was suddenly accused of beating his wife, raping his dog (or the other way around) and jumping into his car to mow down every pedestrian he sees, wouldn’t we be so shocked that a fraction of us would refuse to believe the allegations against him, based solely on his public persona? And who’s to say that that a good number of that fraction couldn’t be assembled for jury duty in the Hanks case? Surely Woody or Forrest Gump would never go on a killing spree, therefore Tom Hanks couldn’t, either. That’s the same alarmingly effective argument Michael Jackson zealots use to defend their former King of Pop.

The one big difference is that we all had a few sneak previews of Michael Jackson‘s weird-ass behavior prior to his trial (buying Elephant Man bones, sleeping in an oxygenated booth, dangling his own kids over balconies). The whole O.J. thing came out of the blue. One day he’s a former football hero, the next day he’s puttering down the freeway in his white Bronco with the entire L.A. police force on his tail. He’s known today to a whole new generation as the guy who got away with murder. Back then, we were still trying to grasp the inconceivable notion that an All-American hero was capable of knifing his wife.

So who’s to say the jurors in the O.J. trail weren’t unduly influenced by his charming role in The Towering Inferno and his kitty rescue? If dumber-than-average moviegoers converge in a single jury room, then there’s no way O.J. could have killed his wife and boyfriend.

We all watched the car chase, the trial, the verdict. How else can you explain him getting away with murder?

But O.J. is only one of 17,000 stars to make an appearance in The Towering Inferno, in which the world’s tallest skyscraper (looking like a giant middle finger on the San Francisco skyline) catches ablaze, trapping hundreds of people on the top floor. It’s the undisputed mother of all disaster films, and one of the few that's truly a classic. The Towering Inferno has it all: fire, explosions, destruction, a billion subplots, a dopey song interlude, that kid from The Brady Bunch, and plenty o’ death (death by falling, death by drowning, death by explosion, death by helicopter, death by blunt objects, and of course, lots of death by combustion), all wrapped up in a cozy 165 minutes that feels more like 90. Sure, The Towering Inferno trucks out every disaster cliche in the book, but it’s executed so well that we easily forgive the cardboard characters, the goofy dialogue (as when Faye Dunaway compares sex with Paul Newman to a cheeseburger), and the ridiculous climax. None of that matters; the movie’s too damned fun, and I defy you to find anyone whose seen it that didn’t have a good time (by “anyone”, I mean anyone normal). Of course the film is stupid, but so manipulative that you can’t help but go along with it, much like I’m sure the O.J. jurors were swayed by his act of feline humanity, even while people throughout the building were being broiled alive.

The Towering Inferno was the last truly great disaster movie made in the 70s (and the last good movie producer Irwin Allen would be associated with), mainly because I think everyone involved in its production had no pretenses about what they were making...big, grand, no-brain entertainment, the kind of bloated, star-driven melodrama that really wasn’t being made at the time. Brainless movies today are the norm, but back then, with a lot of self-important young directors calling themselves artists, such a movie was indeed a rarity. It was also one of the last movies made where the studio wasn’t embarrassed to admit how much they spent (Hell, the voice-over in the theatrical trailers bragged about it). There’s no attempt to challenge the intellect here, nor are there any star-making breakthrough performances to boast about. The movie itself is the star, even though it features a cast of Hollywood big-guns (such as Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen, who does what he does best, which is be Steve McQueen).

I’m sure the producers were as surprised as the rest of the world when The Towering Inferno was nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Picture. Considering its competition (The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Lenny and The Conversation), the idea that it had a chance of winning seems laughable. But let me ask you this...how many of those nominated films would you actually want to watch a second or third time? Chinatown was confusing, Lenny was depressing, The Conversation was downright boring, and anyone telling you different is either lying or they haven’t actually sat and watched them lately. That leaves Godfather II (which deservedly won) and The Towering Inferno, the only two nominated films in 1974 I'd want to sit through a second time. To me, that’s the definition of a great movie.

Plus, O.J. saves a kitty! Let’s see Michael Corleone do that!

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS: It's A Bird's Life...And It Sucks

Narrated by Morgan Freeman. Directed by Luc Jacquet. (2005, 80 min)

March of the Penguins is, so far, the only “documentary” I ever paid to watch in a theater. Not by choice, mind you. Like most theatrically-released docs, it started off in art houses, but once word got out that penguins were the new black, and my oldest daughter (10 at the time) saw the trailer, guess who got the privilege of taking her to the movies to bask in their cuteness?

Growing up, I was never a big fan of documentaries. The last thing I wanted in cinematic entertainment was the feeling I should be learning something. They reminded me of being back in school, when my burned-out social studies teacher would show a dry, 60 minute video of the Civil War in lieu of actual instruction. Not to date myself, but these snoozers weren’t even videos as we know them now. They were actual film reels shown with a clickity-clackity projector, lovingly spooled by the clichéd, nerdy AV-savvy student who once existed in every class, later rendered extinct once technology became so idiot proof that even my grandmother learned how to pop in a DVD after 17 hours of instruction by yours truly.

Not every school-sanctioned documentary was a dull montage of grainy black & white war photos. I kind of enjoyed the nature documentaries my biology teacher used to show, especially those which showed animals humping. Or maybe I more-enjoyed my teacher's reaction when the entire class would erupt with laughter once two species started going at it. On a few occasions, he’d stop the film and berate our immaturity. But what did he expect? Humping is funny, especially animal humping. With hindsight, it’s obvious that even the producers of these educational films knew the value of on-screen sex as an attention-getter. We laugh, we go ‘eeew’…but at least we’re watching. There’s a bit of on-screen bumping-of-uglies in March of the Penguins, too.

Like I said, not all documentaries are boring exercises in education. Nature documentaries, in particular, hold a special fascination with most people, and not just because they provide the opportunity for us to watch them do the nasty (that’s just a bonus, like getting to check-out Angelina Jolie’s boobs in an otherwise violent action movie). No, we love animals because they are different. Whether these critters are overwhelmingly cute or disgustingly fascinating, the one thing we do actually learn from these films is that animals have a harder time getting through life than we do. I mean, how would you like waking up each day knowing there's a good chance you could be eaten on the way to work?

Based on what we see in March of the Penguins, there’s no species on the planet whose life is shittier than those little birds waddling around Antarctica.

A lot of modern nature documentaries (at least those made by directors who actually want their films to make money) aren’t really documentaries in the purest sense, and may have taken a cue from Walt Disney in order to boost the drama. Remember those old Disney's True Life Adventures, the ones which amusingly depict the life and death struggles of various species, all set to a comedic music soundtrack and jovial voice-over by narrator Winston Hibler? Turns out most of those weren't true documentaries either, with some of the scenes staged by the filmmakers.

Think about it, the only way they could have captured a hapless raccoon rolling down a mountainside while stuck inside a log is if they shoved the poor critter in there and kicked it down the hill. In fact, it was later discovered by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that, for the film, White Wilderness, the scene showing hundreds of lemmings leaping off a cliff to their deaths was actually set-up in advance, using a rotating platform installed by the crew. Like those old True-Life Adventures, many modern nature docs are loaded with drama, at least until you think about what the filmmakers did to get some of those shots. What, you thought the makers of Winged Migration didn't place that nest of helpless chicks in the path of an approaching combine?

There isn't any obvious filmmaker manipulation in March of the Penguins, but at the same time, you've got to question their agenda in documenting the slow deaths of such cute little birds. Sure, that's just nature in action, which is fine...but don't spend all that time getting me emotionally attached to them!

Nature is the perfect fodder for movie drama. With a bit of manipulation from the film crew, a heart-wrenching scene in a nature documentary is as emotionally riveting as Kevin Costner playing catch with his dad in Field of Dreams, at a fraction of the cost.

Even in nature docs, giving the viewer a lot visual spectacle is more important than providing any actual info, like those shows on the History Channel, which use CGI to depict various spectacular ways our world could come to a violent end. If you do not know what I’m talking about, just check out the History Channel’s programming schedule on any given day. Odds are there will be at least one program dedicated to impending Armageddon, either by asteroids, global warming or biblical prophecy (maybe it should be called the We're History Channel). March of the Penguins provides such spectacle. We may not see them scorched by a rogue asteroid (that would be uber-sad), but the numerous panoramic shots of these critters waddling across the open Antarctic landscape is as stirring as Moses leading the Hebrews over open desert.

March of the Penguins is a French film in the tradition of Microcosmos and Winged Migration: awesomely cool to look at, even if we don’t really learn that much (except that the snail-on-snail action in Microcosmos will put you off your lunch). But unlike those, this one didn’t actually start off as a documentary. The original French cut was sort of a love story with actors providing the voices for the penguins. It wasn’t until March of the Penguins was altered for U.S. release that all the dialogue was replaced by narration from Morgan Freeman (whose authoritative voice could make Rambo look like an accurate depiction of post-war syndrome). At any rate, the actual facts presented about the subjects of these aforementioned French films take a backseat to showing a lot of cool things to look at. March of the Penguins offers only one cool thing, but it's a really cool one thing, like the knock-knock joke a four-year-old learns and thinks is the height of hilarity even after telling it for the umpteenth time. The film features penguins, thousands of them, and most of the running time is dedicated to showing these birds engaged in the single activity that makes them so endearing…

Waddling.

Waddling miles and miles across a bleak white Antarctic landscape in order to mate or feed or whatever. And it’s cute as hell, at least until some of them start dropping dead from the cold, or others finally finding a break in the ice so they can dive into the water in search of food, only to get eaten by a walrus or whale. And yes, babies die, too. But, like your four-year-old repeatedly telling you the same knock-knock joke, watching penguins endlessly waddle can get old after awhile, so these asides of horrible death actually provide a break for the viewer.

And sure, we say, “aaaw, poor little penguin,” but something else gnaws at us while we're watching, something we don’t want to think about in relation to one of the most adorable species on Earth…

…what a dumb fucking animal.

This movie establishes early on that, for most of the year, Antarctica is so goddamn cold that even the penguins can barely stand it. Sure, they can’t fly to a warmer climate, but they sure as hell can swim. We know this because March of the Penguins provides ample footage of these birds gracefully cutting through the ocean depths like fighter planes breaking the speed of sound. Yet it doesn’t occur to a single one of them that they don’t have to tolerate the living hell God saw fit to place them in. They choose to.

So, in actuality, March of the Penguins does offer some facts we may not have known about the species before:

1) Being a penguin sucks.

2) Penguins are stupid.

3) My own problems suddenly don’t seem so bad, even the ones that are my fault.

Still, I over-analyzed the hell out of this movie while my daughter and I watched the events unfold. Being 10, she bought into the drama and plight of the penguins, shedding a tear or two when a penguin froze or starved. All I could think about was, if I am ever reincarnated as a penguin, then I must have really, really wronged someone in my previous life.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978): Never Sit Beneath The Balcony

Starring Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, David Emge, Scott Reiniger. Directed by George A. Romero. (1978, 127 min).

1979 was a watershed year in my life, when I watched a movie that made a kid puke. The offending flick was George A. Romero’s classic, Dawn of the Dead. It’s hapless victim was one Mark J. Fortner.

When I first saw a commercial advertising Dawn of the Dead, man, did I want to see it! As a 14-year-old horror fan, nothing gets you more pumped-up than a movie ad that ominously announces the film is so violent that it has no MPAA rating. On the other hand, nothing shoots the wind out of your sails faster than the addendum in the same ad which states ‘no one under 17 will be admitted.’ Period.

Goddammit!

Worse yet, since most theater chains wouldn’t book any unrated movie (which is still true today), Dawn of the Dead would likely not be shambling into any mallplex in the ‘burbs (kind of ironic when you consider the plot).

Sure enough, it only played in one downtown college theater for a few weeks. So much for sneaking into it at the Southgate Theater near my house.  Alas, I had to settle for reading about Dawn's gory glory in the pages of Fangoria.

Then, almost a year later, a miracle happened. Dawn of the Dead popped up as the bottom half of a double bill (with Phantasm) at the trusty old Cinema V, an ugly, ancient, puke-colored, second-run theater in downtown Milwaukie, the suburb where I lived and only a twenty-minute bike ride away. I’d gone there many times, mostly when my allowance money was running low but I still needed my movie fix. The admission price was always only 69 cents for as long as I could remember, and that was for two movies! 69 CENTS was perpetually plastered on its cracked and weathered marquee at least five times bigger than the movie titles themselves. In fact, most of us had been calling the place Cinema 69 for years (snickering like Beavis & Butthead once we eventually learned the connotation of that number).

Even though the place was old, dank and had a big slit in the screen no one bothered to repair, it was pretty awesome to be able to catch a movie just by rummaging through sofa cushions for loose change. Even better was the fact that Cinema V never checked IDs. I couldn’t believe it: the mother of all zombie flicks, 69 cents, no ID check. The stars must have aligned that weekend in 1979.

God bless the second-run theater, an endangered species nowadays. There’s hardly any of them around anymore. As it becomes cheaper and more convenient to watch movies at home, one by one, these theaters are dropping like headless zombies. Sure, some still exist in major cities, but usually only after rechristening themselves theater-pubs, where hipsters congregate to pretend they enjoy microbrews that taste like socks, or cinema-arcades to train young kids the fine art of gambling. Even the old Cinema V is now one of these, it's once-spacious auditorium chopped in half to make room for Skee-Ball and Whack-A-Mole. Movies alone are seldom enough to keep these places in business, even with an admission price less than a glorified milkshake from Starbucks. There are still a few second-run cinemas left which offer just movies, but I think it is just a matter of time before they are all gone. That’ll be a sad day.

Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but I truly believe all movies are best on the big screen. But I am also a practical man, increasingly unwilling to roll the dice and shell out 60 bucks (admission for my family, popcorn and a few sodas) unless I am almost guaranteed to enjoy the film I’m mortgaging my house for. Second-run theaters always gave me the same opportunity at a fraction of the price. But that's now. Back in '79, all I cared about was hopping on my bike and pedaling into Milwaukie one summer afternoon with my best buddy Clay and our sort-of friend Mark Fortner.

I say 'sort-of' because Mark was more of a friend out of proximity. His family moved into our neighborhood the previous year. He was a nice enough guy, but a clean-cut, goody-two-shoes who went to a private school. He had a stupid sense of humor and often said the dorkiest things at the most inappropriate moments. The guy wore thick glasses, always tucked in his shirt and acted like he committed the perfect crime whenever an expletive escaped his lips. In other words, not cool, as defined by me and Clay. His dad, a pediatrician, was also a piece of work. He looked and talked like Ward Cleaver and had the creepiest laugh I'd ever heard in my life. If I was ever going to make a movie about a seemingly normal family man who turned out to be a serial killer, I'd cast Mark's dad. 

One time while we were all playing in Mark's driveway, Dr. Fortner popped his head out the door and, with a congenial grin and stupid laugh, said, "Hey gang, be careful not to hit the garage door with that basketball."
Me and Clay stared at each other, barely suppressing laughter.

Gang? Gang? What were we, the Little Rascals? Me and Clay were merciless in mocking Dr. Fortner, yet Mark took it like a good sport because it was obvious he wanted to fit in with his new friends, but had little idea how. He'd buy Led Zeppelin records just because we did, even though his personal preference in music was geared more toward the Bee Gees. When he tore the brown paper wrapping off of his new copy of Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door, we chided him endlessly because the brown paper bag wasn’t wrapping; it was the album cover.

The neighborhood we lived in was still in development, so there were always several houses at various stages of construction. We played in those structures a lot, often engaging in our favorite activity, dirt clod fights. The rules were simple...divide into teams and try to nail each other. We introduced Mark to this sport on his first weekend in the neighborhood. In an effort to make new friends, he was up for it, but once I had him cornered in a ditch surrounding a house-in-development, he let his true colors fly. He was a sitting duck and he knew it. I stood over him above the ditch, arm cocked and ready to pound him with my dirt-grenade. Clay was nearby, giggling uncontrollably as he urged me to make the kill-shot (and he was on Mark's team). At this point, Mark started to cry. That made Clay laugh even harder, which was all the encouragement I needed to open fire. I missed, by the way, which was probably a good thing. Although we loved dirt clod fights, none of us really wanted to hurt each other. Mark was already bawling when my projectile exploded next to his head. I’d hate to think what would have happened if I’d nailed him. Clay would later swear up and down Mark wet his pants while cowered in that ditch. Whether or not that was actually true didn't dissuade me from relaying that detail as the climax to the story when I told others.

Yeah, we were sometimes pretty terrible to Mark, but that’s not to say we didn’t like him. Despite his social awkwardness, Mark was a nice guy. And, God bless him, he put up with a lot of shit just so he could be included. We never objected to having the guy around, especially in the summer, since he was the only kid in the neighborhood with a pool.

So when me and Clay decided to pedal down to the Cinema V to check out Dawn of the Dead, Mark wanted to tag along, which was fine with us. Dr. Fortner, however, had some initial reservations when Mark asked for permission. Permission? Really? Couldn’t he just lie and go anyway?

Mark’s dad warily shook his head. “I don’t know. I heard Cinema V is a shady place.”

Shady place? It was an old theater, not a strip club. And who the hell described any place as shady anymore? We never let Mark live that one down either.

Still, Mark was able to convince his dad to let him go, conveniently leaving out the fact we were going to see an unrated zombie movie. I didn’t actually tell my parents about Dawn either. Mom already once forbade me from seeing the main feature, Phantasm, during its initial run because of the tag line, ‘If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead.’ Maybe Mark himself didn’t know or care what we were seeing; he was just happy to be included.

So we got there, bought popcorn and settled into the front row of the balcony (remember those?). The place was pretty full, mostly with a bunch of other kids whose IDs were obviously not checked at the door.

Dawn of the Dead is director George A. Romero’s sequel to his 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. Although released a decade later, Dawn picks up shortly after the events of the first film, only now the living dead have overrun the world. Two SWAT guys, a chopper pilot and his girlfriend escape in a helicopter and eventually find refuge in a shopping mall. After ridding the place of zombies, they barricade themselves in and proceed to live out the fantasy most of us have entertained at some point...having a whole mall to yourself. This idyllic existence is later disrupted when a gang of bikers lay siege upon the mall, allowing the zombies back in. Our heroes, now down to two, manage to escape, but the film ends with their ultimate fates unknown.

That’s the quick & dirty summary. Much has been written over the years about the film’s satiric commentary on consumerism, that the zombies themselves are not the true monsters...we are, devolving into animals once society has broken down and can no longer keep us in check. All that and a thousand more metaphors are exploited in the movie’s 127 minutes (epic length for a horror movie, but Dawn never feels that long).

But none of a movie’s social commentary matters when you’re 15 and suddenly exposed to the most graphic violence you’ve ever seen. People are eaten alive, whole chunks of flesh bitten from bodies; skulls are severed by helicopter blades, screwdrivers are thrust into temples, heads literally explode from gunshots, zombie children are gunned down, etc. This wasn’t just violence...this was gore.

While we were taking all of this in, it became obvious Dawn of the Dead was not the kind of movie Mark was used to. Me either, actually, but at least I’d been working up to it, having survived Jaws, The Exorcist, The Omen and Alien. But the violence in Dawn was way beyond any of that. And here was Mark, whose maximum exposure to movie mayhem was probably seeing Krypton explode in the original Superman.

There are some things Tylenol just can't fix.

During much of Dawn, Mark was green in the gills, but managed to man-up and tough it out for awhile, at least until the climax, when the aforementioned biker gang starts getting ripped apart and dismembered by the zombie hordes. Torsos are torn open, intestines are spilled and devoured, arms are ripped from their sockets, all while the victims are still alive. I have to admit, even I was getting a little queasy. But Mark couldn’t handle it. At the height of the biker slaughter, he leaned forward, eyes squeezed shut. He lurched a few times, clutched his stomach, then loudly spewed a geyser of projectile vomit. Since we were seated in the front row of the balcony, his stomach chowder rained down in chunks and splattered people twenty feet below us. I heard screams. Mark, grabbing his midsection, stumbled toward the exit.

Clay was laughing his ass off.

While the movie kept playing, I leaned over to see puke-drenched patrons standing up in revulsion, hands outstretched in disbelief. Several of them bolted from the theater, others stared up accusingly at me and Clay. We did our best to look like we had no idea what was going on.

By this time, the stench of Mark’s puke wafted to my nose. That, along with the disembowelment going on onscreen, made my own gut to a few summersaults. Thank God I managed to swallow it back down, because I knew this was yet-another socially awkward event Mark would never live down. I sure as hell didn’t want to join him as an object of ridicule. The only other time in my life I ever came that close to puking because of a movie was when I saw Jackass.

As the end credits of Dawn of the Dead rolled, a few Cinema V cronies came into the theater to clean up the mess below. The manager stormed up to the balcony and demanded to know who was responsible. Me and Clay had since moved to another section of the balcony, acting like personas non-grata, so he paid us no attention.

After a brief delay, the main feature, Phantasm, finally began. Having cleaned himself up and looking a bit less green, Mark eventually came back up and sat with us, and we all watched the movie in relative silence. Phantasm wasn’t a bad movie, but not very scary, and aside from a great scene involving a flying silver ball drilling into someone’s skull, kind of anticlimactic after the carnage of Dawn of the Dead.

Today, Dawn is a classic and widely considered the greatest zombie film of all time. For years it was the most gloriously violent thing I’d ever seen. When it later came out on video I used to love watching it with newbies who had no idea what was coming. The film immediately spawned countless imitations, many spewing out of Italy. Some were okay, most were shit, but Dawn just got better with each viewing, mainly because it was never just a gore film (even though that’s what I first loved about it). It’s a smartly-written, vicious attack on materialism that’s as morbidly funny as it is scary.

As for Mark, he managed to survive, though we gave him a lot of grief for puking up his popcorn, and as usual, he took our chiding with a good-natured grin. For all of his social inadequacies, the guy was a damn good sport. Because of that, maybe he was a better friend than we ever gave him credit for.

Mark and I kind of drifted apart shortly after I discovered girls, cars, booze and weed, while he continued taking school seriously and was a valedictorian his senior year. Shortly after I (barely) graduated high school, I think it was his younger brother who told me Mark got a full scholarship to USC or something. I, on the other hand, dropped out of community college to marry my high school sweetheart (but that’s another sad tale). Obviously, his encounter with the living dead at the Cinema V didn’t do any permanent damage, but I’ll bet he’s still not a zombie fan.

AMERICAN POP: Eggs & Vodka Do Not Mix

Featuring the voices of Ron Thompson & Lisa Jane Persky. Directed by Ralph Bakshi. (1981, 96 min)

I have bad memories of this one. Really bad.

I spent my teenage years growing up in a neighborhood development called Alderhill (don’t ask me what the hell that means). My parents had a house built there, a really hoity-toity block where the builders constructed homes based on the buyer’s specifications. We moved into our house when I was 13; only about half of the neighborhood homes had been completed, and there were numerous others in various phases of construction. A kid I vaguely knew from school, Clay, was already living there with his parents, and because of our proximity to each other, he soon became my best friend.

Clay was (and still is) a great guy, with an off-kilter sense of humor and sharp wit which often came to the forefront when he’d drop obscure pop-culture references into conversations. He also did some crazy stuff (which I often encouraged), such as the day he decided he’d it would be cool to be a pyromaniac. So off he went one day to achieve this new goal, filling balloons with propane from his dad’s garage before lighting them up. The instant result was a brief-but-huge ball of flame. Then one day he had the brilliant idea of tying together a dozen propane-filled balloons and igniting them in his back yard. He ended up blowing his eyebrows off. Soon after that he smartly decided being a pyromaniac wasn’t such a great idea.

Clay wasn’t really crazy or anything. A lot of what he did was deliberate, for the purpose of amusing his friends (much like the guys on Jackass years later, only they actually got paid to do shit like that). He wasn’t stupid, either, though he had that reputation because he had to repeat the eighth grade. Quite the contrary; the guy was smart as hell and got consistently better grades than I did in high school. With hindsight, I think a lot of the crazy stuff he did came from a desire to fit-in with the crowd we considered cool at the time.

And Clay never had to beat his parents to the mailbox to intercept report cards, like I did. This was back when grades were sent home on carbon sheets, and I discovered it was possible to deftly incorporate the clever use of an eraser and blue pencil to change a D into a B. I even purchased the supplies required to alter my grades into something my parents would deem acceptable. The ruse worked a few times, but I got cocky once, erasing an F so hard that I tore through the paper. Considering I got grounded for bringing home C's, I thought my life was over. When I told Clay of my dilemma, he just laughed and taunted me with what seemed like dozens of phone calls where he cackled, “You screwed it! You screwed it!” This didn’t help; my world was coming to an end, and my best friend thought the whole thing was funny. Of course, all these years later, it is hilarious. What’s doubly hilarious is, after several weeks of no report card in the mail, my parents finally decided to search my room. They found the incriminating evidence under my mattress. They were so upset about my grades that they weren't at all fazed at the tattered Penthouse magazine I also had stashed there.

Me and Clay did a lot of pretty dumb stuff together, and some of it was probably bad enough to land us in juvie if we were caught.

Actually, we were caught one time. Me, Clay and another kid named Brian all told our parents we were spending the night at each other’s houses, just so we could drive around all night and raise some hell. The first activity of the evening had us going to the Foster Road Drive-In and getting loaded on vodka Brian stole from his parents. To save some cash, I stashed away in the trunk of the car before going in. By the way, if you’ve never ridden in the trunk of a car, trust me, it ain't worth the extra savings, especially bouncing around with a tire iron up your ass.

The theater was showing a double-bill, American Pop and Tommy, the latter being a musical relic from 1975 based on an album by The Who. Tommy played first. I remember wanting to see it when I was younger, mainly because I was an Elton John fan and loved his version of “Pinball Wizard.” It turned out I didn’t miss much. I didn't like The Who’s music to begin with, and even though the movie was loaded with stars, including Jack Nicholson, Oliver Reed, Elton John (who can’t act) and Tina Turner (who can), the only part I enjoyed was Ann-Margaret writhing around in baked beans. I was always somewhat infatuated with Ann-Margaret, and probably would have eaten baked beans more often if she was waiting for me underneath them. Another strike against the movie is that there is no dialogue. The story is all told in song, which I’m not necessarily against, but I personally blame Tommy for probably inspiring Alan Parker and Roger Waters to do the same thing years later with Pink Floyd The Wall (my vote for the most boring musical of all time, even with the aid of narcotics).

Still, Tommy was better than American Pop, an animated movie directed by Ralph Bakshi, who's been mistaken for a genius on more than one occasion. This was the guy who made the first X-rated cartoon (Fritz the Cat) and was the first to try adapting The Lord of the Rings as a movie. He also decided to use his dubious animation skills (much of which consisted of Rotoscoping, a crappy and cheap technique which involves tracing over live-action footage) to chronicle the history of popular music in American Pop. According to the genius of Bakshi, the evolution of modern rock culminates in a drug-dealing James Dean look-a-like lipsyncing a Bob Segar song (Bob Segar is the culmination of popular American music???). Even though well-snockered by this time, the three of us pretty-much agreed the movie was phenomenally slow, crudely animated and boring, even back in 1982. Today, it looks downright archiac.

Being a big music fan, I was willing to actually give the movie another chance when it played on cable years later. After all, lots of movies are better the second time. But I wasn’t able to sit through it again. Too many painful memories. Not of the movie itself (it’s been deservedly forgotten by most people), but how I associate seeing it with what transpired later that night.

Have you ever done something really stupid when you were younger, and when thinking about it years later, you shutter at how dangerous your actions really were, and how much worse things could have turned out if luck wasn’t on your side? I have a lot of memories like that, such as when me and Clay once snuck out in the middle of the night and got the bright idea to try and climb a 300-foot radio tower. Even though this genius idea was initially mine, I got increasingly cold feet as we approached the tower, and it was only with Clay’s encouragement that we kept going. He even volunteered to climb first, which turned out to be a good thing for me; Clay only got about ten feet up before he was electrocuted and thrown back to the ground. He was scared, dazed and sported a nasty burn on his arm, but other than that, he was okay. Thank God because, besides losing my best friend, I wouldn’t have been able to effectively explain his char-broiled demise to his grieving parents. I have to admit, though, his terrified ranting on the long walk home afterwards, when he briefly entertained the notion that he really did die and was now in Hell (yes, we were both drunk), is pretty chuckle-worthy.

But not even a year later, on that fateful night when we saw American Pop, I discovered that there was one thing scarier than a near-death experience…getting busted.

It was around three-in-the-morning, long after leaving the drive-in, and the three of us were discovering that staying out all night wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We were tired and bored, but couldn’t go home; the lies we told our parents excluded that option. We tried to get some shut-eye in the car, but have you ever really tried getting a good night’s sleep in in one?

That’s when I had the bright idea to egg a house. But not just any house; the house of a kid we all hated. The kid in-question, Dan Sweet, had never done anything to us personally, but he was ‘different’ from us, and somewhat lacking in social skills, so of course he was deserving of punishment.

No, I’m not proud of that. Dan, if you’re reading this, sorry man. I hope life has treated you better than we ever did.

So after stopping by a nearby 7-Eleven to grab some ammo (this was back in the day when apparently there was nothing suspicious about three red-eyed teenagers buying a carton of eggs in the middle of the night), we headed to the Sweet residence. I knew where he lived because I walked past his house every morning on the way to school.

Upon spotting the house, which was totally dark except for a porch light, we gathered our eggs and climbed out of the car. After we scanned the surrounding homes to make sure no one happened to be peering out their windows, we let the eggs fly, splattering the roof, the front door and one of the bedroom windows. Laughing hysterically, we jumped back into the car and high-tailed it out of there.

It was maybe twenty minutes later, Brian once again driving around with nowhere to go, that Clay spotted flashing red and blue in the distance behind us.

“Shit!” he cried. “Is that a cop?”

I turned around. The lights must have been a quarter-mile back, but they were coming fast. “He ain’t after us,” I said confidently, probably because I was still drunk.

“Oh, man,” Brian said, unsure of what to do. “Should we pull over?”

“No!” I snapped back. “He’s probably going on another call.”

“What if I was speeding?” Panic spread across Brian’s face. “Oh, shit, we got booze and eggs in the car!”

I whipped around to Clay, who was sitting in wide-eyed panic in the back seat. “Stash the bottle and the eggs!” Then I turned to Brian. “Turn off on the next street. Maybe they’ll just keep going.”

He never got that chance, because the cops were indeed after us. Still, I refused to believe it was because of the assault on Dan’s house. After all, we’d never been caught before. We were too smart, right?

Brian pulled over. The flashing police lights were blinding in the rearview mirrors. Two cops ordered us from the car. We complied, and it wasn’t until we were being frisked that reality instantly sobered me up.

The cops tossed the car, and almost immediately found the nearly-empty vodka bottle and egg carton.

“I swear to God, I had no idea those were in there!” I remember claiming, even though both Brian and Clay had already manned-up and admitted what we did. Not much of a friend, was I? Turning chickenshit to try and save my own ass.

One of the cops, sporting a bushy porn-star mustache and coffee breath, got in my face and sneered, “I don’t think I like this kid. He’s a fuckin’ liar.”

I nearly pissed myself.

“Tell you what…either we call your parents or haul your sorry ass to jail.” He leered at me with a shit-eating grin I’ll never forget.

Jail or parents. What, no third option, like death? I would have preferred that one over calling my parents.

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is seeing my parents driving up in their Volkswagen to pick me up by the roadside where cops stopped us. Dad always had a short fuse. No, he never beat me or anything, and was an awesome father, but he was also easily angered back then (which suddenly went away forever after he later retired from his career in public education…fancy that). But on this night, he had no expression at all as he climbed from the car to collect his delinquent son. His face was the scariest thing of all. No emotion, no rage, nothing. That’s when I knew I really screwed up. I triggered something in him beyond anger. I didn’t simply piss him off. I truly disappointed him, which was worse.

Mom was in tears, of course, as I knew she would be. She was also still living in total denial, because she couldn’t bring herself to believe her son could be involved in such an activity without being coerced by his friends. I must have given in to peer pressure. For a short time afterwards, she forbade to hang around Clay, even though egging the house was actually my idea. In fact, a lot of the deviant behavior we engaged in was my idea.

I got grounded for about 800 years, which I deserved. I also remember being pissed that Clay got off scot-free; his parents just chalked it up to boys being boys. Where could I buy parents like that? It could have been worse, though. I could have gone to jail, and thank God the Sweets chose not to press charges. Still, this incident is the only time in my life where I was nailed by police and treated like a criminal.

I don’t know whatever became of Brian - he was more Clay’s friend than mine - but Clay turned out okay, having developed some common sense long before I chose to. I still talk to him on the phone from time to time, and he’s married with a good job.

To this day, even if American Pop was the greatest animated achievement of all time (which it isn't), there’s no way I could watch it today without reliving that night in excruciating detail. Getting busted for egging a house may not rank me in the company of Dillinger, but when you are 17, it’s like your world is coming to an end.

THE PLAGUE DOGS: The Feel-Bad Movie Of All Time

Featuring the voices of John Hurt and Christopher Benjamin. Directed by Martin Rosen. (1982, 103 min)

Hands down, the most relentlessly depressing movie of all time is The Plague Dogs. Go ahead, offer Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice, The Road, Seven or anything directed by Abel Ferrera as rebuttal. If you do, you have either not seen The Plague Dogs or you truly believe that animals are as godless as the Graboids in Tremors. If you are one of the latter, I don't want to know you, but I’m more inclined to believe you are one of the former. Who doesn't love animals? How often we watch films where countless people die, yet if even a single animal is in peril, we think, "No, not the dog!"

The Plague Dogs is a movie where nearly every cruel, violent or horrifying event is inflicted on man's best friend.

Aside from my wife, to whom I subjected this movie when I found it on the shelf of a now-extinct mom-and-pop video store, I’ve still never met anyone who had even heard of The Plague Dogs, even though it is based on a novel by Richard Adams, renowned for penning the bestselling classic, Watership Down. That book was later adapted for the screen by director Martin Rosen.

I tried reading Watership Down as a kid but couldn’t get through it, mainly because Adams expected the reader to keep referring to a glossary at the end of the book to understand the terms used by his rabbit characters (any book which requires you to educate yourself before enjoying the story isn’t worth reading). But the tale itself was intriguing enough to spawn a pretty great animated movie in 1978. This wasn’t your normal Disney cartoon fare. Watership Down is very British and very violent, the first cartoon I ever saw where blood is visually split and characters die onscreen, sometimes horribly.

As a kid whose cinematic tastes had graduated beyond G-rated Disney fare, the idea of an ‘adult’ cartoon had a lot of appeal. Hence, I loved Watership Down, which is still considered by many to be one of the greatest non-Disney, traditionally-animated movies of all time. Today, as a teacher instructing seventh grade students in persuasive writing - when I require them to view and write a review of a film - I occasionally truck out my copy of Watership Down. Even in this age of gory Japanese anime (or in the case of Sailor Moon, pedophile training ground), I still hear kids occasionally blurt out, “Holy crap, that bunny rabbit just got killed!”

Some of my students like the violence, others are shocked. The main problem most of them have with Watership Down is, in the filmmakers’ strive from realism, it is difficult telling the rabbits characters apart because they all look the same (a totally legitimate argument). And absolutely none of them knew why a film with such a title had no actual ships in it. Neither did I for the longest time. I had to look it up (it is the name of the grassy hill the rabbits discover in their quest for a new home, a place which actually exists in England). But even though Watership Down is a dark film, it is ultimately a life-affirming tale of selflessness, bravery and faith.

Not so with The Plague Dogs, which is easily the most nihilistic, brutal and bleak movie I have ever endured. Like Watership Down, it is animated and the fact it was made by the same director was the main reason I picked it up at the video store. But aside from the style of animation and British voices, the similarities end there. Unlike the somewhat-anonymous rabbits in Watership Down, we immediately form an attachment to the animal characters in The Plague Dogs, making subsequent events in the film so obscene.

The plot centers around two hapless pooches, Rowf and Snitter, trapped in a research facility which conducts cruel experiments on animals. Snitter is sort-of nuts, suffering the effects of experimental brain surgery. Rowf is repeatedly subjected to tests where researchers document how long he’ll struggle to survive by treading water before giving up and drowning, then they fish him out so they can repeat the experiment again the next day. This is all in the first five minutes of the film. It only gets worse from there. Rowf and Snitter manage to escape the facility, only to be relentlessly hunted by the local community and the military due to a falsified press release that the two dogs are carrying a lethal plague.

Through heart-breaking flashbacks, we learn Snitter was once a loyal pooch loved by his master. Later, while the two dogs are on-the-run, Snitter comes across the lone sympathetic human character in the movie, who is hunting in the woods. With the hope of finding a new master, Snitter is excited and hopeful, only to have this promising meet-&-greet end tragically when the dog’s paw hooks the trigger of the rifle, blowing the man's face off. Rowf, on the other hand, has no illusions and doesn't trust humans, having never experienced bonding with a master. Along the way, the two dogs befriend Tod, a sly fox who ends up being killed while trying to help. During all this time, both dogs are becoming visibly thinner from hunger and are later forced to eat one of the very people hunting them in order to survive. 

At the end, surrounded by military guns and helicopters, Snitter and Rowf reach the coast. With no choice, they try to escape to the ocean and swim toward what they think is an island, when in reality  is just the setting sun. The film ends with the exhausted dogs, long past the point of no return, about to drown, yet still believing they’re going to find safety.

That’s it. And remember, this movie is a cartoon, and even though it is rated PG-13, I found it in the kids’ section of the aforementioned video store. What makes the movie even more of an ordeal is that the two main characters aren’t singing Disney dogs with sparky personalities reflective of the celebrities who voice them. They behave, think and speak the way we imagine real dogs would, unable to comprehend why all this is happening, yet remaining hopelessly optimistic that there is a human out there somewhere who will love them. This makes their ultimate fate as hard to watch as movies get.

The Plague Dogs is extremely well made; the animation and voice characterizations are as good as, if not better than, Watership Down. But it is also so dark, disturbing, relentlessly oppressive and so contemptuous of humankind that it makes Watership Down look like The Emperor’s New Groove (if you consider yourself a ‘dog person’ it will fuck you up for life). And this tone is set so early that the viewer is pretty damn certain within a few minutes that this is one movie where things are going to end badly. I have never seen a movie where more craft and care was taken in making sure its audience feels like total shit afterwards.

Yet whenever you come across various critic or fan lists of the most disturbing movies of all time, The Plague Dogs is almost never included. Is it because the film is animated, the atrocities presented are inflicted on dogs or that the movie simply hasn’t been widely seen? Whatever the case, the film is as painful to sit through as Schindler’s List, and although I admire it, I don’t think I could ever sit through it again, especially now that I own a dog.