Goin’ to the movies, gonna eat me a lot of peaches

by Jack Haze

Mr. Vampire

Hop to it, boys!
One of the great downsides to religion is the amount of ritual they demand from you.
As you watch the film Mr. Vampire, you will see the various pitfalls of choosing Taoism as a faith. If you are buried wrong, you will turn into a hopping vampire and cause shame to your family. You will also have to deal with various ghosts and other spiritual menaces.
What is the answer to this problem?
Kung Fu.
Need you ask, bright boy? The answer is Kung Fu, spells, reburial, dancing on sticky rice, and holding your breath. Vampires, you see, the hopping kind, can’t see you if you don’t breathe.
At least there are knowledgable Taoist priests here and there who can be of help. This one looks a bit like Bruce McCulloch from the Kids in the Hall, except older and, of course, Chinese. He is aided in his calling by two bumbling assistants, one a complete idiot and the other merely a naive fool.
So the deal is, visit China now, while the vampires and ghosts are still in check. The youth today are just not up to the task of fighting off evil.
Available on DVD with your choice of Cantonese or Manderin sound and a plethora of subtitles, including English if that’s your bag.

Star Wars: Attack of the clones

The story so far, in a galaxy far, far away...
Man bad. Bad man good man’s father. Bad man destroyed. Bad man presented as past hero. Bad man entwined in tragic love story.
So, here we are, up to the present day.
We at VN like to get to the heart of the matter, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

So the big innovation is not the digital effects or the digital cameras, or the digital editing or the digital fingers, but the storyline precedent.
The innovation Star Wars brought in the 70’s, after all, was, above and beyond anything else, not the repopularization of space opera, but the advent of modern movie merchandising- with everything from action figures and comic strips to dixie cups, potato chips, and fast food tie ins.
This is now ubiquitous.
I treasure my Seven Samurai collectable fast food drink cup. And my Godzilla medicated eyedrops.
At VN we are nothing if we are not lovers of culture. We eat sleep and drink consumerism. We’re Americans. Get with the program, Poindexter.

We now anxiously wait for all the other prequels where we get to know, identify with, and dare I say, love, those characters we already love to hate.
Characters like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes, Dr. Strangelove from the movie of the same name, or the sublime evil of the alternate universe captain Kirk, explained and enhanced.
All misunderstood, emotionally charged, and ready for a new, second, look!
The best is yet to come.

Henry Rollins- Talking from the box

(2.13.61) My first exposure to Henry Rollins’ spoken material was on some second hand LPs. I was blown away by the material. He talked about anything and everything. It was great. It was surprisingly funny. The sound quality, however, sucked.
Talking from the Box makes up for that earlier poor production quality. This is a professional recording job- it looks like, say, an HBO comedy special.
This show was filmed just after the L.A. riots, what Rollins describes as, “the great TV show that engulfed L.A. for 3 days- the shit is on fire show; ” and he poignantly describes the scene on the corner, where the rent-a-cops are about to face the looters- “tan uniform, no gun.” Amidst this havoc, the geniuses at the computer store put up a simple sign to avoid losses, “already looted, already burned.”
He goes on to discuss growing up, relationships, and working in a pet store, where they invented “the Australian sleeping rat” and the fish that “are just floating on the top, waiting to get fed. They want to be close to the food.”
Rollins then changes the mood by reading a short poem that he had written the night before, and launching into a story about a personal tragedy, the death of his friend Joe Cole outside their house in Los Angeles.
Talking from the Box is a funny DVD, at times emotionally moving, but good entertainment throughout.

Freaked

Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) stars as an old child star hired out to be the front man for a chemical company. Specifically, he is supposed to boost consumer confidence in a toxic pesticide. When hired on he asks, “Hey, isn’t that stuff illegal?” “Only in America.” they reply, “...and Europe.”
He travels to a small Central American country where the pesticide is still in use, and is lured into a roadside freak show, where the proprietor (Randy Quaid) changes people into freaks with the aforementioned toxic brew, and a computer system where the mouse is actually a wired up dead rodent.
Once they are “freaked” they meet the others in the side-show. Mr. T stars as the Bearded Lady, and Bobcat Golthwait is “Sockhead” (or his voice is, anyway).
Freaked is a nice little show with freaks galore, Rastafarian Eyeballs, Freak Hollywood Squares, and a dozen or so milkmen. (“Thirteen milkmen on the same route? No wonder they fight.”) It’s well-written, visually interesting, and funny all the way through.

When Women Had Tails & When Women Lost Their Tails

These are two Italian films about life in the stone age. In the first film, five cavemen discover fire and subsequently burn down their surroundings (spreading around the fire so that they won’t lose it). They escape on a raft and land in a desert-type area. There they find Filly, the first women that they have ever seen. They don’t know what she is, but think that she might make a good meal.
The second movie is the funnier, and stranger, of the two. In this film a con man invents money, and buys everything that the five cavemen own, including Filly. He then puts them to work and charges them rent. Despondent, one of the cavemen pays another to push him off a cliff (“Three cents? But you have four, and won’t need them after you are dead.” “Yes, I just didn’t want to die penniless”). Another man keeps losing limbs, until he is just a head, and the con man uses him as an alarm clock.
Part Flintstones, part Monty Python, part sixties drive-in nostalgia, When Women Lost their Tails is a grand way to while away your time, waiting for Hollywood to get around to making the American version with Tim Allen and Jim Carrey.

Quicksand

Mickey Rooney.
If you’ve never enjoyed Mickey Rooney, perhaps you’ve missed his fine performance here, in Quicksand.
Rooney is the everyman. Working in a garage handling the cash register, and how.
He has women dripping off of him. He dumps one- and courts another. But the good girl stalks him- waits outside so as to arrange chance encounters and won’t let him go. Meanwhile he picks up another dame. A fast blond with a fetish for fur.
So he does what he must, and lifts a twenty from the register. From there he buys a watch on credit and hocks it to cover the register, then rolls a guy for his gambling purse when the feds breathe down on him.
Then he steals a car and strangles his boss. I tell you, who hasn’t been there?

Return to Vision? Nary!