Culture Shock 09.11.14: 'Without Warning' pits alien against Oscar winners

Future Oscar winner Jack Palance and future Oscar winner Martin Landau probably weren't thinking Academy Awards when they agreed to appear in "Without Warning." But I'll take "Without Warning" over "Ordinary People" any day.

Released the same year that "Friday the 13th" kicked the slasher genre into high gear, "Without Warning" wastes no time putting a different spin on the soon-to-be-cliched formula of teenagers venturing into the woods where an unstoppable killer awaits to pick them off one by one.

This time, the killer is not of this Earth.

Greydon Clark directs this pre-"Predator" sci-fi movie about an eggplant-headed alien who comes to Earth to hunt "the most dangerous game." Only instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers, the alien targets Palance, Landau and a young David Caruso (in his first role, unless you count an uncredited bellboy in an episode of "Ryan's Hope," and who does?).

Cult movie label Shout! Factory brings this 1980 drive-in classic to home video with a shiny Blu-ray/DVD combo set that includes interviews with the crew and an audio commentary with the director.

The movie starts with two young couples (including Caruso) heading to the woods for a day of fun and relaxation, probably because it's 1980 and YouTube cat videos haven't been invented yet.

Surprisingly, they think this whole going-to-the-woods thing is a good idea despite the scary warning they get from the creepy taxidermy enthusiast who runs the gas station (Palance) and the foreboding graffiti scrawled on the station's restroom walls.

Technically, that makes the movie's title a lie. Clearly there is a warning. Just because you ignore the warning doesn't mean there isn't one. That's just logic, plain and simple.

Anyway, by the time our young victims get to the crystal-clear lake in the middle of the woods, our extraterrestrial Elmer Fudd has already declared hunting season on Golden Age TV actors.

Cameron Mitchell ("The High Chaparral") plays a hunter, Darby Hinton (Daniel Boone's son on "Daniel Boone") plays his son, and Larry Storch ("F Troop") plays the world's worst scoutmaster.

Maybe Clark has a fetish for typecasting actors based on their most famous roles.

Ralph Meeker, who portrayed Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's brilliant 1955 film noir "Kiss Me Deadly," has a small role as a bar patron.

Classic television informs more than just Clark's casting choices. The alien (Kevin Hall), looks like he just walked in from the set of "The Outer Limits." And speaking of typecasting, Hall went on to portray the extraterrestrial big game hunters in "Predator" and "Predator 2."

The alien's preferred method of attack it to throw small, star-shaped aliens — blood-sucking little critters that vaguely resemble the face-huggers from "Alien" — at his intended victims. This makes for some pretty cool and squishy kill scenes.

But the real stars of the show are Landau and Palance. Both still more than a decade away from their Oscar triumphs, these old pros can chew scenery with the best of them, and they do.

Landau plays a Vietnam vet who came back from the war a little funny in the head. He's been convinced aliens are invading for years, so when they actually are, no one believes him. Not that they would have believed him anyway, what with him being funny in the head.

Meanwhile, Palance's trophy-hunter character naturally is the first to realize what the alien's game is and think up a way to fight back. Palance delivers the gasping, wheezing, snarling performance that always made him a terrifying bad guy and, on rare occasions, an even more terrifying hero.

Clark helmed two movies that ended up targets of a good-natured "Mystery Science Theater 3000" ribbing: "Angels Revenge" (aka "Angels' Brigade") and the Joe Don Baker vehicle "Final Justice." But "Without Warning" — like some other Clark movies, such as "Satan's Cheerleaders" and the arcade-culture sex comedy "Joysticks" — is plenty of fun without anyone talking over it.

Culture Shock 04.03.14: 'Ms. 45' gives audience a lot to think about

Thana is a seamstress working in New York's garment district. Every day after work, she and her co-workers run a gauntlet.

Judging by director Abel Ferrara's 1981 film "Ms. 45," men in New York City have little to do but stand on street corners and hurl lewd comments at every woman who walks by. Thana's friends, being New Yorkers, give as good as they get. But Thana (Zoë Lund) is mute. All she can do is passively absorb each unwelcome come-on.

Then Ferrara cuts to Thana shopping in a supermarket. She's in the meat department, of course. She has moved from one kind of meat market to another.

It's easy to read one's sexual politics into "Ms. 45." Ferrara, who also directed the even more controversial "Bad Lieutenant" with Harvey Keitel, and Nicholas St. John, Ferrara's go-to screenwriter, give us a lot to work with. But at its core, "Ms. 45" is simpler than that.

"Ms. 45" is what can happen when the voiceless fight back.

Long out of print, "Ms. 45" returns looking better than ever. Drafthouse Films, the distribution arm of the Austin, Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse theater, has restored and released "Ms. 45" on Blu-ray, DVD and Amazon's video on demand. And early-'80s New York's grime and seediness have seldom been reproduced in such clarity and detail.

"Ms. 45" deserves no less. While overshadowed by "Bad Lieutenant," "Ms. 45" is Ferrara's masterpiece, anchored by Lund's affecting performance. The multi-talented Lund, who died in 1999, wrote the screenplay for "Bad Lieutenant," but in "Ms. 45," she is Ferrara's muse.

Ferrara wastes no time taking Thana's situation from bad to worse. On one of her walks home, a man in a clown mask (Ferrara) pulls Thana into an alley and sexually assaults her. Afterward, she walks home, dazed, only to walk in on a burglar, who then assaults her a second time.

The double attacks recall the most infamous of rape/revenge films: 1978's "I Spit on Your Grave," which wore its feminist revenge fantasy ambitions on its sleeve when originally released under the title "Day of the Woman."

"Ms. 45" is a direct descendant of "I Spit on Your Grave" and 1972's "The Last House on the Left," although it's more stylish and less lurid then either of those polarizing exploitation flicks.

When Thana turns the tables and kills her second attacker, the symbolism is ripe. First she sends him reeling with a blow from a glass apple paperweight, then she finishes him off with an iron. The overworked symbols of woman's deception and domesticity get their revenge.

And so does Thana.

When she kills a pimp, she strikes a blow for women everywhere. And when she kills an Arab oil sheik looking for a good time, it's almost was if she were standing up for all America. This is just a few years after the Arab oil embargo, after all.

In the film's most memorable scene, Ferrara stages a standoff that could have come out of a Sergio Leone Western. She lures a half dozen would-be attackers into an alley and guns them down with the kind of cold-blooded precision that would impress Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name.

As perversely playful as the scene is, though, it's also a sign Thana has crossed the line. From here, her vigilante justice descends into indiscriminate violence. No man is innocent, and no man is safe. The heroine's dark turn is what sets "Ms. 45" apart from the rape/revenge films that came before it. You might not agree with Camille Keaton's bloody rampage in "I Spit on Your Grave," but you at least know her victims have it coming.

By the time Thana dons her Halloween party costume — a nun's habit — she has become an angel of death. Unable to speak, unable to make others listen, Thana's story comes down to this.

Deprived of her voice for so long, Thana finds it again only at the very end. And in the end, all she can do is scream.

Culture Shock 12.19.13: 'Big Gundown' is a Western gem rescued from obscurity

Fewer and fewer vintage films are finding their way to DVD, much less to the high-definition glory of Blu-ray. Too many still languish, in need of restoration and preservation, in the vaults of indifferent studios.

So, give indie distributor Grindhouse Releasing all due credit not only for rescuing "The Big Gundown" from obscurity, but for giving it a release worthy of "Citizen Kane," or "Vertigo," if Hitchcock is more your flavor.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin says "The Big Gundown" is the best spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone, and if that isn't true, it's not far off the mark.

Leone set the standard for the genre with his Clint Eastwood-starring "Man with No Name" trilogy and his operatic "Once Upon a Time in the West," which turned everyman Henry Fonda into one of the screen's great villains. His success spurred many imitators, most famously Sergio Corbucci's "Django." But director Sergio Sollima's "The Big Gundown" (1966) is the cream of the crop.

Lee Van Cleef, who upstaged Eastwood in Leone's "For a Few Dollars More," stars as John Corbett, a bounty hunter looking to turn his reputation for cleaning up Texas into a political career. But Senate campaigns don't come cheap, even in the 1800s. So, when a rich businessman (Walter Barnes) offers his backing in exchange for help getting a railroad through his property, Corbett accepts. After all, the railroad is good for all of Texas, Corbett figures.

They've barely sealed the deal when news comes of a 12-year-old girl's rape and murder, and the lone suspect is a knife-throwing Mexican outlaw called Cuchillo (Tomas Milian). What better campaign publicity could you ask than bringing in a notorious child rapist and murderer to face justice? It's all so convenient. Too convenient, as it turns out.

Finding Cuchillo is surprisingly easy, but keeping him is another matter. Corbett may have cleaned up Texas, but he has never faced anyone quite as wily as Cuchillo, who tricks his way to freedom time and again, and charms beautiful women with raw machismo.

Milian plays Cuchillo with charisma to spare. He may be a rogue, but we don't believe for a minute he's really guilty. For once Van Cleef is the one getting upstaged, and that's by design.

Van Cleef delivers a measured performance that pays off when we get to the "big gundown" the title promises. The inevitable showdown pits Corbett against the businessman's personal hired gun, a monocled Prussian baron (Gérard Herter) who left a pile of dead duelists back in Europe.

Cuchillo starts out disillusioned with both the Mexican government and the revolutionaries looking to overthrow it. By the end, Corbett is left wondering if politics north of the border is any better.

Like other Italian-made Westerns, "The Big Gundown" is filmed on location in Spain, and Sollima and cinematographer Carlo Carlini make the most of the desolate yet gorgeous Mediterranean locale. This is an Old West that's deadly yet seductive, especially as reproduced on Blu-ray by Grindhouse Releasing.

It has been a banner year for Grindhouse, coming off last year's tragic death of company co-founder Sage Stallone (son of Sylvester Stallone) at age 36. First there was Grindhouse's Blu-ray/DVD combo of the little-seen Peter Cushing horror flick "Corruption," marking the 100th anniversary of Cushing's birth.

Now there's "The Big Gundown" ($39.95 suggested retail), a four-disc release that belongs on every cinephile's shelf. The set includes two Blu-ray discs (the English-language version and a longer Italian cut with English subtitles), the English-language version on DVD and a CD of revered film composer Ennio Morricone's energetic score.

It's a lavish presentation of the sort more films deserve.

Culture Shock 12.27.12: Criterion's new Blu-ray returns us to 'Brazil'

Has any filmmaker, besides Orson Welles, faced as much misfortune as Terry Gilliam has in bringing his movies to the screen?

Gilliam's attempt to put his stamp on the story of Don Quixote is the stuff of legend. He began filming "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" more than a decade ago, and after fits and starts and changes of leading men, the movie still isn't made, although it has spawned Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's engrossing documentary about Gilliam's futile efforts, "Lost in La Mancha." More recently (and tragically) Gilliam's 2009 film "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" lost its star when Heath Ledger died in the middle of production. Gilliam salvaged the footage he'd shot with a plot twist that allowed other actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to step into Ledger's role. But the resulting film was a disappointment on almost every level.

Gilliam's most famous struggle involved his 1985 masterpiece "Brazil" — one of my all-time top 10 films — which faced trials of a more typically Hollywood sort.

Initially, the studio butchered "Brazil," hacking 48 minutes from its running time and turning what was left into a love-conquers-all romance, complete with studio-issue happy ending. Gilliam had to wage a publicity campaign to shame Universal Studios into releasing something closer to his original 142-minute cut.

Somehow that all seems ironic for a film about the frustrating, dehumanizing and ultimately soul-crushing effects of bureaucracy.

Gilliam's preferred version of "Brazil" (the European cut) has been available on DVD for years as part of the Criterion Collection, but this month Criterion released it on Blu-ray, giving "Brazil" its most definitive and eye-popping release to date.

Unlike most dystopian tales, "Brazil" isn't set in the future but in a dystopian anytime, "somewhere in the 20th century," as the opening titles tell us. It's not so much science fiction as it is a surreal reflection of what American and European societies have already become: governments that resort to police-state tactics with alarming and increasing regularity, a looming threat of terrorism both real and imagined, and endless, mind-numbing paperwork. You can't even get your air conditioning fixed without a proper form 27B-6, a sly reference to George Orwell's apartment number.

It's the sort of world where one clerical error could get a man killed, just as in ours it can land you on a "no fly" list. So, a competent but feckless button-pusher like Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is just a hapless cog in the machinery of government, and the unlikely hero is the mysterious Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a freelance repairman who became fed up with all the red tape and struck out on his own. Now Tuttle is an enemy of the state, a man named Buttle is a victim of mistaken identity, and Sam is mixed up in it all because the literal woman of his dreams (Kim Greist) is Buttle's upstairs neighbor.

Apart from being Gilliam's most visually striking film, with production design by Norman Garwood ("The Princess Bride") and cinematography by Roger Pratt (Tim Burton's "Batman"), "Brazil" is his strongest narrative. No surprise there, as the screenplay is by Gilliam, his frequent collaborator Charles McKeown and playwright Tom Stoppard ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"). And Stoppard's fingerprints are all over the finished result. If there is a reason why Gilliam has never exceeded the artistic triumph of "Brazil" in his subsequent films, I suspect it's the lack of Stoppard's input. Once again, the auteur theory runs into the reality that screenwriters do matter, as much as some critics still like to ignore them.

Stoppard aside, "Brazil" is still very much a Terry Gilliam film, with some scenes coming across as live-action recreations of some of his old Monty Python cartoons. "Brazil" is personal filmmaking that very nearly fell victim to the same impulses it so expertly criticizes.

Culture Shock 10.11.12: Bloody Bava bows on Blu-ray

Only in the past decade has Italy's "maestro of the macabre" begun to get the recognition he is due.

Throughout the 1960s and into the mid-'70s, Mario Bava's atmospheric films — mostly in the horror genre — played in drive-ins and other disreputable venues. Sometimes they were part of double or ever triple features of terror, dismissed by their distributors as disposable schlock.

That's the fate of a working director, which Bava was, grinding out movies on minuscule budgets. He was as much a craftsman as an artist. Bava often was his own cinematographer, and he always handled the bulk of his films' special effects. But he brought artistry to his craft, and that dedication has won him admirers as diverse as Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.
As Bava's movies began to appear on DVD in their original, uncut versions in the 2000s — two decades after his death in 1980 at age 65 — he began to attract a new audience and renewed appreciation. Most of his best films have been released in two DVD box sets, The Mario Bava Collection Vols. 1 and 2. Now Kino Lorber, which released a brilliantly restored version of Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis," is turning its attention to Bava, bringing three of his newly remastered films to Blu-ray for the first time.

Kino's releases include Bava's breakthrough film "Black Sunday" (1960) starring Barbara Steele; his most troubled, yet most personal film, "Lisa and the Devil" (1973) with Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer and Italian screen legend Alida Valli; and his 1970 thriller "Hatchet for the Honeymoon." Kino has released "Black Sunday" and "Lisa and the Devil" under its Kino Classics label, while opting to release "Hatchet" under its Redemption horror label. That's understandable because while all are worthwhile, only the first two are true classics.

"Black Sunday" is Bava's best known and most influential work, the one you're most likely to see on late-night television, especially at this time of year. It's also the film that made a horror icon out of Steele, whose large, hypnotic eyes convey malice as easily as they elicit sympathy, which led to her more than once playing good and evil twins, including here.

On the disc's audio commentary, Bava expert Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog magazine draws our attention to an exterior shot that highlights Bava's attention to detail. The shot lasts a just a few seconds, but it is almost absurdly complex, involving a partial model, matte paintings, forced perspective and in-camera lighting tricks, all engineered by Bava himself.

But for me, Bava's masterpiece is "Lisa and the Devil," which I rate as one of the best films ever produced. Yet this is a film that couldn't even find a distributor when it was made. Bava's producer, Alfredo Leone, commissioned new scenes and released "Lisa" a year later as "The House of Exorcism," successfully cashing in on "The Exorcist" mania, but sacrificing Bava's most heartfelt work in the process. (Kino's Blu-ray includes both versions, so you can judge for yourself.)

By turns creepy and whimsical, "Lisa and the Devil" is part murder mystery and part ghost story, with a dreamlike plot involving characters who may be dead or may be department store dummies or may be figment's of Lisa's imagination. The story, like the village in which Lisa (Sommer) gets lost, is like an M.C. Escher painting, folding in on itself.

And at the center of the proceedings is Savalas, clearly having a ball as the butler Leandro, bemoaning his menial fate while bearing a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a fresco of the devil in the village square.

This is how Bava's greatest films were meant to be seen, in high-definition glory and looking better than when they were first shown. Sit back, and let the maestro conduct.

Blu-ray wins the 21st century’s first format war

The latest great format war is over, and the winner is Blu-ray.

For the past 18 months, Sony-backed Blu-ray and Toshiba-backed HD DVD have battled it out to be the high-definition successor to DVD. During that time, Blu-ray seemed to have the upper hand, but the final blow came late last week.

Warner Bros., which had been releasing its movies in both formats, announced it will go exclusively with Blu-ray, joining other entertainment-industry heavy hitters Disney, Sony Pictures and Fox.

Warner currently sells more DVDs than any other Hollywood studio. But with DVD sales leveling off, it wanted to eliminate consumer and retailer confusion regarding Blu-ray and HD DVD, a company executive said at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That obviously meant using Warner’s huge film and TV library to tip the balance in Blu-ray’s favor.

Warner’s decision leaves only Paramount, Universal and mini-major studio DreamWorks in the HD DVD camp. Industry observers expect all three to make the leap to Blu-ray by the middle of the year. Blu-ray sales and rentals were outpacing HD DVD’s even before Warner’s decision to go exclusively Blu-ray. The remaining HD DVD-aligned studios simply can’t afford to stay on a sinking ship.

Toshiba executives say the fight isn’t over yet, but it is. They just haven’t admitted it. Toshiba’s position is either spin or a river in Egypt.

So, if you purchased the first season of Universal’s “Heroes” on HD DVD, you probably shouldn’t count on seeing subsequent seasons released on that format.

While this is bad news for HD DVD’s early adopters, at least we shouldn’t hear a lot of complaints this time around about how the “better” format didn’t win. Most videophiles either rate Blu-ray and HD DVD as about equal or give Blu-ray the edge. That wasn’t the case with the last big home video format war — the war between VHS and Betamax.

Sony’s Betamax videotape format died an ignominious death in the early 1980s, and Beta’s partisans cried foul. They said Beta’s audio and video quality were superior to VHS’s, which they were. Thus, Beta’s failure was proof that the “better” format doesn’t always win.

But “better” is a relative term. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years until an asteroid wiped them out, paving the way for mammals that had barely eked out an existence during the dinosaurs’ reign. Which was better adapted to survive? That depended entirely on the environment at the time.
During the Betamax/VHS war, the environment favored VHS. Consumers were willing to sacrifice Beta’s superior audio-video quality to get what VHS offered: double the recording time. That was a decided advantage when most consumers just wanted to tape TV shows for later viewing.

Besides, true videophiles didn’t need Beta. They clung to their laserdiscs, which served the niche home-theater market until smaller, more convenient and technologically superior DVDs came along.

So, Blu-ray has vanquished HD DVD and will, in time, replace standard DVDs just as DVDs replaced VHS. Then what? Will we be embroiled in yet another format war in 10 or 15 years?

I suspect not. What is probably next is digital downloading. You won’t have to buy a physical product at all. Instead, you’ll download movies and TV shows directly into some kind of storage/playback device.

That means there won’t be much incentive to replace Blu-ray as the format of choice for consumers who prefer a physical object to bits in a box. Blu-ray may reign for a while, only to become the video equivalent of an audio CD in an MP3 world.