Highway-6 Reviews

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

antiwar

[12 July 2001]

it's a weird movie but maybe a little bit less so if you think about it as having a kind-of antiwar message -- the guy gets so overwhelmed by guilt over the job he does that he basically loses his mind and imagines himself to be a missile that doesn't want to hit its target.

or, another way of thinking about it is, what would happen if weapons could be haunted by the people that they kill? in order to do that you have to make the weapons into living things, which is a big part of where the movie's weirdness comes from, but at the same time there's a real valid point to it, i think -- which is that it asks us to think about the way we wage war, which is shown on t.v. so that it seems not to have a cost in human lives, when in fact, of course, the toll in human life of wars like desert storm is extraordinary and tragic.

i think the movie DOES get a little overwrought with its technical events from time to time, but i think too that it DOES have a basic message that helps to understand it, and it'd be a shame if that message was missed because i think, whatever its flaws, it conveys and explores that message (about the human toll of "pushbutton" or antiseptic modern wars) brilliantly.

oh, and it made MY dog talk, too. how about that? i'm convinced anyone who sees this movie seven times can be deemed legally insane. having said all i said above, i have to admit that this is probably the absolute STRANGEST movie i've ever seen, and i've seen some strange ones. i liked it anyway, though.

Jail Bait (1954)

It's about guns, not girls

[31 July 1999]

A morality play a la Reefer Madness, with guns instead of grass. Marilyn Gregor (Dolores Fuller), a fifties good-girl, is bailing out her brother Don (Clancy Malone), who's been run in for gun possession. Although Don's father is a prestigious plastic surgeon, Don Jr. has renounced this respectable profession in favor of a life of crime. He's pretty incorrigible if he's got a gun in his hand so after Marilyn drives him home, he gets a revolver from a hollowed out book to replace the one the cops confiscated and goes out to meet his henchman, Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell), at a downtown watering hole. It seems the two have one last caper to commit before bedtime: they hold up an office for $23,000 in theater payroll checks. Unfortunately, the holdup goes wrong; Don kills a security guard/retired cop and Vic tags a fleeing secretary but doesn't kill her. The cops arrive but Don and Vic shake them after a languid car chase that (maybe because Ed Wood forgot to get a shooting permit and didn't want anyone to know he was making a movie) obeys all traffic laws. They're safe for the time being but the secretary they failed to kill is a living witness so word gets out soon enough that Don is a cop killer. Choked by remorse, Don visits his father's office and Doctor Gregor convinces him to surrender to the authorities. But Vic catches Don there, takes him back to Vic's hideout, and after a brief altercation shoots him dead. Vic and his girlfriend Loretta (Theodora Thurman) trick Doctor Gregor the plastic surgeon into giving Vic a new face to escape the law, using for leverage a claim that they are holding Don hostage. When Doctor Gregor discovers that Don is already dead, he gets revenge by surreptitiously giving Vic Don's face. The police identify Vic as Don, the cop killer, and kill him after a quick and bloodless shootout. Justice having been done, we can all shake our heads ruefully and go home.

An essentially unremarkable cops-and-robbers potboiler, Jail Bait is pretty good evidence that Ed Wood gets far too much credit for making bad films. Though Wood's dialogue delivers the occasional trademark nonsequitur-when a police inspector (Lyle Talbot) explains to Marilyn that "carrying a gun can be dangerous business," she rejoins that "building a skyscraper" can be dangerous business, too, thus demonstrating that she's missed his point entirely-by and large this movie is marginally competent. I wouldn't make such a point out of this except that Ed Wood's "badness" is the key component of his continued notoriety; I guess I'm suggesting that anyone who's seen a movie as wretched as Paranoia or Blood Sisters (to name two of about four billion examples) should be unimpressed by Wood's supposed ineptitude.

The movie is most interesting when it's suggesting that our free wills and capacity to make decisions abandon us in the face of relatively banal stimuli-in this case, the condition of holding a gun in his hand is enough to make Don take leave of his senses and start shooting everyone in sight. Several times he insists that "I never thought it would come to this," just as the dope smokers of Reefer Madness seem to watch on helplessly as their own lives go up in bubbly, gurgling lung-smoke just because they couldn't see the long-term peril in a puff of marijuana. Doctor Gregor provides the obligatory Freudian theory for Don's miscreantism-turns out Dad spoiled Don as a child and the little fellow also suffered from an absent mother, "God rest her soul"-but this is largely an afterthought. The more Doctor Gregor and Marilyn sacrifice themselves for Don, the more we realize his upbringing was just fine; he simply can't think straight when he has a pistol in his hand. When Doc and Marilyn are preparing to meet with Vic for the first time the movie seems to consider pursuing this idea seriously-Marilyn, wanting only to protect Don, drops another in an apparently interminable supply of handguns into her purse-but once there the gun never resurfaces so the movie never makes good on its promise to transform Marilyn into a murderous fiend once she decides to pack heat.

Don't be fooled by the tagline-underage girls are not the "jail bait" of this movie's title. Guns are. Guns. Get it?

Zaat (1971)

I thought it was okay

[6 May 1999]

Well, no, actually it's an abominable movie, but odd in an interesting way -- I suppose partly because of the filmmakers' ineptitude. If it's riffing off of Frankenstein, why does the catfish creature have to find attractive women to try and mutate into fish brides? Where does that beauty go once you've been mutated into a fish?

And how was I supposed to feel when he breaks into a pharmacy and starts knocking things over? Eerie screeching came over the soundtrack as though this were a moment suffused with inner psychological drama, but maybe the suit the guy had to wear fragmented his performance so much that this really didn't get communicated.

I think if I'd watched this without the puppets, I'd have permanently lost my mind. That's got to count for SOMETHING.

Godzilla (I) (1998)

What's so great about Godzilla?

[18 December 1998]

The only redeeming thing about this flick is that it made me think about what in the original films provides viewing pleasure (and it's true that most of them, technically, aren't very good). See _Godzilla vs. Monster Zero_ for sheer, shlocky, antenna-helmeted hilarity -- this movie lacks the campy elements of the later flicks in the original Toho series, and also lacks the genuine apocalyptic fear of the '54 film. One of the freakiest things about the original is the fact that Godzilla resembles no real animal -- vaguely gorilla-like but the color of atomic fall-out and completely instinctive, non-conscious, like a shark. Emmerich mistake #1: making Godzilla look like a lizard made him banal, too real-world. Mistake #2: giving him (her? it?) a maternal instinct did the same thing. Emmerich's monster isn't a stand-in for the mystery of splitting the atom -- it's just a real big critter, and nothing about that is interesting at all.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Minor Masterpiece

[18 December 1998]

It's hard to understand why some persnickety folks insist on dwelling on the physics flaws in this film when it's clear the film itself is completely unconcerned with being realistic -- the Arachnids hurl asteroids, literally, from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other (a distance measured in hundreds of millions of light-years) and they reach Earth in a matter of hours. Such a blatant dismissal of the laws of physics clearly demonstrates that the film could have cared less about these things.

ST is a lot of fun, but I think there's a little more going on than that. The enlistment propaganda, laughable as it is, goes to the "Be all you can be" ads you might see on cable TV, and the juxtaposition of this propaganda with the spectacle of infantry troops being hacked to ribbons underscores the lie of these "Be all you can be" ads. ("The mobile infantry made me what I am today.") Also, the bugs come conveniently pre-dehumanized -- a clever take on the recent dehumanizaton of the Middle East, after we did the same to the Vietnamese, the Japanese, etc. (Granted, they did the same to us -- it doesn't seem possible to fight a war without bringing some racism to bear on it.) All in all, a loud, blaring movie with an undercurrent of subtle subversiveness, in the word's noblest sense.

The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969)

Odd

[18 December 1998]

Quizzical and somewhat painful Argentinean softcore porn flick has the good quality of being one of the few competent unions of exploitation with mainstream genre film. In this case, sci-fi, and see _Flesh Gordon_ if you have any doubts about how difficult a genre fusion of this kind can be. The movie drags at times, but at others is fabulously bizarre, probably because of the tortured logic Vieyra has to use to establish the (relatively) intricate plot without compromising the explicit scenes. Humpp's legendary sequence -- a weird, mutated critter playing an unidentifiable lutish instrument while people mill about a foggy courtyard -- is strange beyond description.

Stalingrad (1993)

Great flick

[14 December 1998]

I thought this movie was outstanding, politically of an ilk with Das Boot. With a couple of the same minor flaws, too -- the score is sometimes heavy-handed, pacing is sometimes slow. But the flick goes pretty far, I think, in humanizing the WWII german army (the "grunts," anyway) and showing the lie in a lot of previous hollywood WWII flicks where the Germans are a bunch of extras waiting for John Wayne to shoot them.