Monday's Mailbox
Scoopy,
I'm looking for good-quality stills and video of De'Anne Power from the
"Beverly Hills Bordello" episode entitled "Forbidden Fruit." De'Anne is a
striking, mature (mid-30s) and sophisticated blonde who plays a harried
executive who poses as a employee of the bordello in an effort to get her
sexual mojo back. She shows full nudity during the sex scenes, including a
full light blonde bush, unusual even back in the day when women has
bushes. :) If anyone out there can post this material, much appreciated.
3finger
Answer
Hey Scoop,
I noticed in the Mailbox that 3finger is looking for De'Anne Power in an
episode from Beverly Hills Bordello. I happened to have that one, so I
made the captures and contact sheets. Didn't have time to capture still
frames, but I can get to that later. I'm uploading them tonight.
Tell him that I also have her on DVD in "Rod Steele 0014" if he's
interested. Just let me know.
Aesthete
See Aesthete's section for parts 2 and 3 of the film clips and
samples. Part 1 is in yesterday's page.
Asylum
2008
This is one of those movies which has a self-reviewing synopsis:
"Teenager Madison McBride is traumatized by the loss of her deranged
father when she was nine years old and the suicide of her beloved brother
Brandon one year ago. She decides to attend Richard Miller University,
where Brandon committed suicide, to overcome her demons. While walking to
her dorm, she meets the weird janitor Wilbur Mackey that tells her that
the place is haunted. Madison befriends other freshmen: the recovering
drug addicted Holt; the geek outcast String; the sexually abused Ivy and
Maya; and the joker athlete Tommy. All the schoolmates have childhood
traumas.
String discovers on the internet that their dorm, together with an
attached abandoned section, was once an asylum for troubled teens
administered by Dr. Magnus Burke and was considered a safe refuge with
state-of-art treatment. In 1939, the interns revolted against the insane
doctor, killing him and disclosing the truth about his sadistic treatment. The students soon find that their dorm is haunted by Dr. Burke, who is
seeking tortured souls."
So what do you think? Is this a film made by a superb craftsman who
loves the art of cinema, and is bringing his heart to the project, or is
it a quickie pasted together from hackneyed ideas in the hope of making a
quick buck?
I'm thinking you already know the answer.
You know how sometimes you forget that you've seen a particularly
unimpressive movie, so you actually get a few minutes into the movie
before it dawns on
you that you've seen it already? Well I had that experience with this film, except that instead of
realizing that I had seen it once before, I realized that I had seen it a
hundred times before, except with a different cast. I suppose there's
nothing wrong with that. Some theatergoers returned to Phantom of the Opera
every time the cast changed, just to see how the new team ran the plays.
If you're one of those who has to go back to a Broadway play every time
the producers come up with some new gimmick like an all-black or all-male
or all-TV-star or all-circus-clown cast, then this may be your kind of
film experience. I doubt it, though. People only go back to see revivals
of plays they consider great or important or beloved. Nobody is clamoring
for a remake of Gigli with an all-dwarf cast, which is the rough
equivalent of what this movie does.
The film has not a single new idea, not a single original or
interesting character, not one good line of dialogue. It's so inept that
there is a character in the film (the "joker athlete") whose character
development as "a joker" consists entirely of him claiming to be one. He
never says anything to make the audience laugh. That alone would be bad enough,
but the audience might at least get a hint of where he's coming from if he
said something to make the other characters laugh. Not a chance of that
either! I had no idea he was supposed to be funny until he was explaining
why he became the class clown.
Here's the ultimate demonstration that the filmmakers just didn't give
a hoot:
Two characters escape the asylum through a tunnel which has been
abandoned for decades, and is blocked on both ends by rusted-out grates.
Inside the tunnel there are two light bulbs.
They are both burning.
I guess I could go on, but since the people who made this film didn't
give a fig, why should we?
Even the nudity sucks. The star, Sarah Roemer, did a shower scene, but
the editing techniques dictate that very little can be seen.
Here it is anyway.
Feast II
The first Feast film, which I have not seen, was a product of the
Affleck/Damon reality show project, Project Greenlight. Splatter
aficionados were quite pleased with it because it defied their
expectations of a safe, mainstream kind of effort. Instead, it was a
demented, over-the-top gorefest about a small group of humans trying to
survive in a world being attacked by some super-human beasts.
Feast II is more of the same twisted and uninhibited NC-17 stuff, but I
gather that this one was too jokey for the gorehounds. It's essentially a
sick comedy. The humans still alive include a bartender (Clu
Gulager!), a gang of lesbian bikers, and two "midget wrestlers," plus a
used car dealer, his unfaithful wife, and her lover ... and various
others. Shock II is trying to accomplish only two things: to shock you
with gore and to make you laugh at sick, gallows humor. There's casual
dismemberment, bodies rotting while still living, a messy autopsy of one
of the beasts, inter-species rape, a baby thrown to the monsters and
devoured, and so forth. The shock value is increased by the cavalier
attitudes of the characters, who are either total bad-asses or complete
cynics. There is not a decent human being anywhere in the film, which
makes it hard to root for them in their battle against the monsters, and
the number of sympathetic characters is matched by an identical number of
plot twists.
Humans die one by one. End of screenwriting assignment.
Oh, yeah, and the story is internally inconsistent and has no ending.
The film was obviously sculpted for a highly targeted audience and has
absolutely zero mainstream crossover appeal. Although it has some
imagination, some sick laughs, and some good acting performances, you
won't like it unless you're really into the Troma style of "splatstick" -
gore for lowbrow yuks.
Period.
I did enjoy seeing Clu Gulager again. Hell, before I watched this film
I had no idea Clu Gulager was still alive.
And, judging from his performance, neither did he.
I'm kidding. For a 79 year old man who had rarely spoken above a mumble
when he was young, Clu actually turned in a surprisingly feisty and
energetic performance. In fact, one might say that Clu is responsible for
the entire movie, in a sense. His son directed; another son starred; a
grandson had a small role; the director's wife also starred.
The family that slays together ...
There's no need for a more expansive review. The big nude scene below
is basically the last 16 minutes of the movie, and the other scene is
basically the movie's intro. Those two clips show you exactly what kind of
movie you're dealing with. If you like this stuff, buy it, because the
rest of the film is the same wild material:
Chelsea
Richards and Melissa Reed were topless for the film's final 15 minutes.
Believe it or not, that was not gratuitous. Their clothing was needed to
help build a catapult. Rather than edit the action down to the nude
scenes, I just left it intact so you can see what's goin' on.
Amy McGee may or may not have
contributed this nudity. It is her character, but I don't know whether
we are looking at her or a mannequin when the beasts drag her through the
window.
The other nudity in the film came from Juan Longoria Garcia, a little
person with an absolutely enormous penis. It is real. They found him
working in a novelty act in Tijuana and hired him, despite the fact that
he can't speak a word of English. He speaks only Spanish throughout the
film, and there's no explanation for the fact that his brother speaks
perfect English with no accent! It's that kind of film.
