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"Vampyres", from Johnny Web
There are those who
extol this as a brilliant gothic romance. Ignore
them. It has exactly three good points.
- To play the lesbian
vampires, they hired the most gorgeous
women they could find. According to the
box, Anulka was a former playindividual,
and Marianne Morris looks like a young
Loren.
- They dubbed these
beautiful bims over with experienced
British stage actresses so the acting
doesn't destract from the mood.
- They found a really
cool castle to shoot the exteriors and
interiors.
Apart from that, the
film bites the big one. It's slow, has virtually
no plot, is completely predictable, and all the
chilling moments are mis-timed because of poor
cutting of the audio or video or both. The scenes
are dark, often out of focus, and sometimes the
heads of the actors wander out of the shot
altogether. The shots are composed
unimaginatively.
But the two main girls
are hot, and they do get naked. Sally Faulkner is
not especially hot, but she's not bad, and she
gets naked as well.
Anulka Dziubinska (1,
2,
3,
4)
Marianne Morris (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6)
Sally Faulkner (1,
2)
"Jagged
Edge", from Johnny Web
This 1985 script is the
flip side of Basic Instinct. Jeff Bridges is a
newspaper editor who is accused of killing his
wife. He's friendly, charming, seductive, and
nobody believes he really did it. Everyone
believes that it's just a campaign strategy by
the slimy local D.A.. Joe Eszterhas actually did
a good job on this script. His improbable plot
twists and red herrings are as ludicrous as ever
but ...
SPOILER AHEAD ...
He does everything
possible to make you believe that Bridges didn't
do it. Not only The Jeffster nice and handsome
beyond belief, but the evidence is tainted, the
same D.A. has planted and withheld evidence in
the past, the prosecution witnesses lie, and
there is the usual other suspect who is a total
slimeball. Yet Bridges did do it. No sell-out, no
happy Hollywood ending, but a simple fact staring
you in the face in the final scene. And this
delicious twist makes up for all the implausible
and manipulative plot points. Plus Eszterhas was
more careful than usual here, and there weren't
any massive gaps in the logic of the script or in
the motivations of the characters
Quite competently
directed by Richard Marquand, who died quite
young. As a reminder, he's the guy Lucas chose to
direct Return of the Jedi. Very competently acted
by an excellent cast, (Bridges, Glenn Close,
Peter Coyote) especially Robert Loggia is the
ultimate foul-mouthed seedy detective who doesn't
ever believe anything anybody tells him.
I mentioned some weeks
ago that I would really be surprised if Jeremy
Irons is ever funny. I will be even more
surprised if Glenn Close is, but I have to admit
I haven't seen those doggie movies, and she's
supposed to be pretty funny in those.
Glenn Close. These
collages are pretty ugly. The lighting was really
dark, so in both cases I show you the same image
twice. Once (the large image) as seen on screen,
and once with all kinds of color manipulation (1,
2)
Maria Mayenzet. And you guys say we never
feature any big stars! Marquand did a very
spectacular job in the camera set up and ambient
light for this scene, even if it is darker than
we perverts would like it.
"Conan
the Friggin Barbarian", from Tuna
Tuna's comments: When
young Conan's mother totally loses her head in an
attack by a rival horde, young Conan is captured.
The brilliant captors decide to affirm the Yankee
work ethic by having him push a wheel for several
years. They succeed in turning a young Conan into
Arnold Schwarzeneger, and then train him as a
gladiator. For the rest of the film, Arnold opens
a can of whoop-ass on anyone he doesn't like.
After a hard day of maiming, he plays with a
ready supply of topless women. Probably the
highlight of this DVD is the full length
commentary by the director and Arnold.
Scoopy's comments: When
I was a young fool in high school, only a shadow
of the old fool I was yet to become, I read every
one of the Conan stories by Robert E Howard, and
there were about a zillion of them. I would look
up all the countries he mentioned and try to
figure out the modern-day equivalent. I would
then try to construct a Conan chronology, putting
all the stories in the correct order, like others
do for Sherlock Holmes. Pretty screwy, by Krom.
Howard wrote them all
for the pulps in the Pulp Fiction boom of the
20's and 30's, when Weird Tales and others ruled
the dreams of the boys of that generation, as
comics and Mad did for the boyhoods of my
generation. Howard was a friend of the famous
horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft, and they admired
each others' work. They were both lonely
bookworms, probably with sexual identity crises,
who were excessively devoted to the women that
raised them. They created their swashbucklers and
all-powerful blasphemous Old Ones in acting out
the swaggering masculine fantasies so remote from
their real lives. This made them the perfect guys
to create stories for the boys who read the
pulps, since the readers received the same ego
transferral from reading the stories that Howard
and Lovecraft did from writing them. Hmm - I
suppose this applied to me as well in the 60's.
Howard was so attached to his mom that he
committed suicide at her deathbed. He was 30.
The movie is engagingly
fleshed out with some serious classical actors
like James Earl Jones and Max von Sydow, who both
seemed to enjoy making fools of themselves. It
includes an appearance from mysterious Valerie
Quennessen (sorry, not nude)before her
unexplained disappearance. (The most reliable
accounts say she is now dead, the victim of an
auto accident, if I remember correctly.)
thumbnails
Cassandra Gava (1,
2)
Leslie Foldvary (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6)
Nadiuska (1,
2)
Sandahl Bergman (1,
2,
3)
Valerie Quinessen (1,
2,
3)
Unknown (1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
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