Updates:

• I added about 600 new pics to existing volumes the encyclopedia, in virtually every section, and added about 200 new pics in 8 new volumes. (All changes in yellow)

Silence Becomes You (2005)

Silence Becomes you is a straight to vid filmed in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Let me shout out a "Stop!" before you run out to Blockbuster to get it. I know it sounds terrific so far, but there are some other things you should know.

Alicia Silverstone and Sienna Guillory co-star in what is essentially a three person play about a couple of strange sisters who bring home a drifter for ... well, I guess that purpose is kind of the point of the movie. You're supposed to figure out exactly why they have brought him back to their mansion and why they are so odd and reclusive to begin with. All of that is basically revealed in flashbacks.

In the present time, the drifter falls in love with one of the sisters, she seems to reciprocate, and this causes the other sister to become crazy with jealousy. It's not what you think. She doesn't want the guy for herself. You see, they brought the guy home for a specific purpose, and if sis falls in love with him, it will spoil the grand design. Moreover, the two girls have lives which are so intertwined with one another and their old house that the jealous sister cannot bear the thought that she might lose her only companion to the outside world.

It functions somewhere between a ghost story and a psychological drama. Although the audience sees ghosts, for example, they turn out not to be real, but memories as seen in the eyes of one character or another. Sometimes they just seem to be metaphorical ghosts. For the most part it stays on our side of the great beyond, but I have to admit that the couple of times when it strayed into the paranormal were very irritating. After all, this is the kind of film where the audience is kept interested by trying to guess the secrets.

"Are the sisters ghosts? Are they crazy? Were they originally planning to murder their guest? Will the jealous sister murder the guest to retain her special relationship with her sister? Just why do they behave the way they do?" 

In order to keep the audience guessing about these matters, the script introduces a few elements that seem paranormal. What annoyed me is that the explanation turned out to be psychological, not paranormal, and the previous paranormal incidents were never explained. In other words, they were just in there as red herrings to keep us guessing. I have nothing against that in principle. No good sleight-of-hand can exist without some misdirection, and even the best directors use some red herrings, but it is essential that the false clues must fit into the final explanation, and that was not the case here. To give one example, when Silverstone tried to run away with the drifter, the other sister (Guillory) started to burn Silverstone's picture. As the picture burned, the camera switched to Silverstone, who was reacting in pain as if the picture had been a voodoo doll. When Guillory had a change of heart and doused the flames, Silverstone's pains stopped immediately. So my question is this - if the final explanation for the girl's behavior is scientific and exists entirely in the real universe, as we are led to believe, then how do you explain the voodoo doll effect? My take on it is that it was just there to allow the scriptwriter to deepen the mystery by suggesting that the sisters had some kind of unearthly connection. Yet that did not conform to the ultimate explanation. That's cheating.

I found some other details quite annoying as well. (1) Alicia Silverstone must have done ten sex scenes in this film, and never showed any kind of flesh at all - not even a good look down a nightgown. I suppose there are those who would be entertained by a profusion of fully-dressed sex scenes, but I do not count myself among them. (2) The film has one of those ambiguous, under-explained endings that just leave you thinking, "whaaaa?"

Having made those points, I'll add that there is some talent on display in this film. Rural Lithuanian estates are pretty damned atmospheric in the wintertime, all three of the actors are competent, and the tone of the film is both consistent and effective.

The most memorable element of this production occurred off-camera. Silence Becomes You was filmed entirely with a high-definition (1920x1080) video camera with a true 16x9 aspect ratio. The film's dailies were projected each night onto a custom-designed ten foot screen with a special HD projector developed especially for this job, thus allowing a director in Vilnius to have even better "rushes" than he would have back in a Hollywood studio. The publicity material called this movie, "The world's first 100% digital cinematography feature film."  Read the detailed technical specs here.

Sienna Guillory

Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974)

Here's a good tip for you drifters. If a stranger offers you his hospitality by saying he'd like to have you for dinner, make sure you clear up the inherent ambiguity of his invitation. Especially if he looks like Laurence Harvey.

That is precisely the lesson learned by a hippie drifter named Robin (Meg Foster), who accepts a dinner invitation from ol' Larry before she discovers that when he says he eats chicks, he doesn't mean small chickens, and he's not making a reference to oral sex. It turns out that Larry served in Korea and he was forced into a situation where he had to eat human flesh to survive, and he just really developed a craving for "long pork," especially of the female variety, and particularly with a light mustard/tarragon sauce and a bottle of beaujolais. Chicks - the other white meat! Larry really gets into gourmet cannibalism, and even entices his spooky sister to become a big fan of of his favorite entree, "Drifter Dijon."

Poor Meg Foster never sees the warning signs in advance, although some of them seemed kind of obvious, like Larry's sister telling her to lock her door, and mainly the human heads on the wall in the trophy room.

Hey, c'mon, I keed. Larry was actually a nice guy. In fact, he lived to serve women.

Meg finally figures things out when she wanders around the house at night and sees ol' Larry chopping up a human corpse with a meat cleaver. She barely manages to runs away and share her story with the local gendarmerie, who simply won't take the word of a homeless hippie chick when she's pitted up against the solemn authority and gravitas exuded by a local war hero. So she has to ... (is your guess locked in?) ... take the law into her own hands.

By acting in and directing the film, Laurence Harvey became the Orson Welles of cannibal films! Unfortunately for Larry's memory, he passed away from this world in between the time that the film was "completed" (I use that word hesitantly) and the release date, thus assuring that Arrow Beach would be remembered as his final contribution to the dominant art-form of the 20th century. It also comprises half of his career directorial output. He directed only one other film, an equally obscure 1963 offering called The Ceremony.

Harvey's acting in the film is predictably intense and haunted and joyless, as you might expect from a man playing a tragic cannibal while he himself was dying of cancer, but that was just typical grade-B stuff, and would not serve to make the film especially memorable. His direction is what makes the film really shine with incompetence. The musical score, for example, is non-stop elevator music, capped off by a Lou Rawls love ballad which is crooned in the performer's characteristically mellow style over the opening credits. If that weren't enough to destroy the tone of a cannibal film, there's also the standard comic relief that only an incompetent deputy can provide! (Where was David Arquette when the seventies needed him?)

The film also has a lot of problems that were probably derived directly from Harvey's terminal illness. The second half of the movie focuses on a detective who is trying to bring the cannibal to justice, and that story is just dropped and forgotten, as if Harvey had been too sick to keep shooting. In fact, that probably is the explanation, because Harvey was even too sick to play the climactic confrontational scene with the avenging hippie. That scene was performed by a double, despite the fact that the double's face is in the shots, confusingly enough! Harvey was also too sick to work with the editor on the final cut, and he made his suggestions telephonically from his deathbed, without actually seeing the results.

The film's greatest problem, however, had nothing to do with the lack of continuity and the inconsistent tone. You may ask, "What could be worse than that?" Well, I'll tell you. Except for a couple of gory scenes, this film is all talk, and it's not just the usually expository dialogue which low-budget movies have to substitute for pictorialization. It's endless philosophizing and debate about such topics as why youths were so aimless in that time, why we need to treat our war veterans better, and other such completely sincere and utterly boring matters which would be more appropriately discussed on Meet the Press than in a movie in which the characters press the meat.

The incompetence of the film makes it unappealing to mainstream audiences, and the inexplicitness makes it too tame for aficionados of the Italian Cannibal Movie genre. That means that the only possible audience for the film consists of bad movie lovers. Arrow Beach does have some tasty moments which will bring a smile to that cynical crowd, but in general it's too verbose and just too damned boring to provide the proper bad movie vibe. On the other hand, if MST3K ever comes back with an R-rated cable show, Arrow Beach should be one of their first endeavors, because this would be a great one to watch with Mike and the bots.

Meg Foster (she was hot and spooky at the same time) Meg Foster video clips (1, 2)

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"Mother"

Mother (1970) is the Don Joslyn film Scoppy wrote expensively about. It was made with no budget in friends apartments, houses and garages and filmed on weekends. I can only assume he got Wally Cox, Julie Newmar and Victor Buono to appear out of freindship. According to an included interview, we know Newmar was not paid.

It looks and feels more like a silent film than a talkie, with most of the gags being physical. Newmar is the ruthless owner of a toy factory. She sees Wallie Cox, a toy salesman and amateur puppet maker, charm children in a toy store, and decides she needs him to make commercials for her, so she assigns Buono to get him under contract. They soon learn that his hobby is following attractive women, and try several to get him to sign. What they don't realize is that Newmar's photo on the contract reminds him of his own abusive mother, and he runs every time. Buono, now in trouble with his own mother, tries to kill Cox.

An anonymous nude model shows her buns, and Angelique Pettyjohn shows both breasts and buns. Graded as a normal film, it is deserving of negative stars, but as a bad movie, it is a real hoot. C.

Angelique Pettijohn Julie Newmar Unknown

"The Lust Connection"

The Lust Connection (2005 Video) The whodunnit staring Glori-Anne Gilbert, uses the Internet hot-line cheating gambit to show the male lead, Frank Harper, having sex with Glori-Anne Gilbert, Monigue Parent, Julie K. Smith, Holly Hollywood, Avy Scott, Chasey Laine and Jodey Moore. These are all three B performances.

IMDb readers have this at 3.6. That score, clearly, reflects the plot, and not the exposure. By our system, this is a C-. Plenty of nudity and simulated sex in good light, but not enough story to rate a C.

Avy Scott Chasey Lain Holly Hollywood Jodie Moore Julie K. Smith Monique Parent

The latest in my own little obsession with Brother Tuna's work. A little of everything in this collaborative effort, including something that would make for an interesting poll of the Funhouse members. That would be: Best One and Only Nude Scene. Jeanne Tripplehorn's scene in Basic Instinct has to be in the top 10. She was a babe.

Agnès Rosier "Loulou"	Alexia Moore "Lust in Space"	Amy Lindsay "Bikini Airways"	Angelina Jolie "Foxfire"	Barbara Caron "Sweet Georgia"
Bijou Phillips "Havoc"	Bijou Phillips "Havoc"	Darian Caine "The Erotic Mirror"	Darian Caine "Lust for Dracula"	Darian Caine "Vampire Queen"
Dina Meyer "Starship Troopers"	Dina Meyer "Starship Troopers"	Elizabeth Cromwell "The Strangler's Wife"	Jeanne Triplehorn "Basic Instinct"	Jeanne Triplehorn "Basic Instinct"
Jenny McCarthy "Dirty Love"	Jessica Simpson "The Dukes of Hazzard"	Loren DePalma "Creatures from the Abyss"	Maria Conchita Alonso "Kingpin"	Marsha Jordan "Sweet Georgia"
Marsha Jordan "Sweet Georgia"	Nikki Griffin "The Dukes of Hazzard"	Polly Adams "With These Hands"	Sharon Stone "Basic Instinct"	Sharon Stone "Basic Instinct"