This Week In Film (5/24/2021 - 5/30/2021)
May 24, 2021 - May 30, 2021
Hello readers. You ever have one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it weeks? I've been keeping a bullet journal for 6 years. I've listed every movie, TV show, concert, headache, intimate event, and every work-related item. The idea is that you can keep track of the progression of your life. Know where your time is going. Plan your time in advance in some cases. But you can look through these journals and see time compressed into pages rather than hours. A year is quick flip. You get really upset, but remind yourself that time passes. It is out of your control. You choose how to fill your time, but eventually it will be a few pictures in your phone. If you're lucky certain moments will pop back into your memory and give you joy again and again. Other moments will fill you with deep remorse and flood you with sadness. But these times too will pass. But that's not what I came here to tell you about...
This Week In Film where I create a weekly rundown of the random sh*t I watch. There’s a HIGH / LOW at the end of this entry, so if words aren't really your thing, you can scroll quickly, look at pictures, and skip to my favorite viewings of the week.
Lets begin...
OVERVIEW:
****
HALLOWEEN: THE MISTER SANDMAN CUT
Halloween (1978) & Halloween II (1981)
dir: John Carpenter / Rick Rosenthal
The idea to combine "The night he came home," with "More of the night he came home," is not new. The idea itself is as no-brainer as removing Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars The Phantom Menace (1999). I'd seen fanedits where this had been done before, but this was the first time I'd seen it with all of the made-for-television footage re-inserted. Growing up, from I'd say the age of four, I'd seen Halloween on TV countless times. Which is to say, at least annually around the holidays, if you're not into the whole hyperbole thing. The TV version was ingrained. I knew that after Michael comes outside and he's de-masked by his parents and the camera cranes off into the sky to show how suburbia will never be the same, that we would cut to Dr. Loomis pleading for maximum security. It wasn't until I was about ten when we bought our first version of Halloween on VHS. Here, after Michael kills Judith, we're in the Smith's Grove station-wagon. I thought there was something wrong with the tape. But when Laurie and Annie are getting high in Annie's car, this was new to me. Thus an obsession was born to collect every version of this film possible. I had the double VHS that came with a still from the film. I've had the autumn tinted color graded versions. The 4K version. The version in the Halloween box set. And now I've seen The Mister Sandman Cut that seems to put everything together in a nice 3+ hour package.
Each time we watch a version of Halloween, there's a game Katie and I play: autumn or fidelity? The first blu-ray released of Halloween that said it was a 2k scan from the original, had an orange tint. The color grading was for fall colors. It looked the way you feel the Halloween holiday should look. When they did the 4k scan and color graded the footage it looked fantastic, the image had never been more clear. But it lost all the fall colors. I don't like one more than the other. Between having TV footage or not having TV footage and between the colors being graded to look natural or holiday themed, Halloween always has an interesting presentation. Or, I'm just way too obsessed.
In this viewing, Katie and I questioned the details in the film. I've always enjoyed the serendipitous phonecall that Loomis makes on his way to Haddenfield. He calls from a payphone, sees a truck in a field, finds a Smith's Grove gown, then finds Marion's matchbook. We get a third punchline, the body of the mechanic from Phelp's Garage. You see that the Rabbit In Red Lounge matchbook is a small detail that solidifies Loomis' belief in Michael returning home. So why then, is the alarm for the hardware store still going off after school is let out? When could Michael have stolen the mask, a couple of knives, and some rope? We hear him breathing from inside a mask when he watches Laurie walk away from his house. We see him in the mask when he watches the school. He still has the mask on when he speeds past them. Logistically, he would have broke into the hardware store right when he arrived in Haddenfield. Can you just imagine owning any shop next to the hardware store and their alarm goes off and doesn't stop for at least 12 hours? That constant ringing. Luckily, they shut it off right around closing time. If you're going to use a matchbook so well, or fogging windows to declare someone is in the car, tell us that the alarm has been on the fritz since someone broke in. Until next viewing, where I'm sure Katie and I will find another gripe in our most beloved film.
THE LAST SHARK (L'ULTIMO SQUALO) (1981)
dir: Enzo G. Castellari
"I don’t think it was a floating chainsaw."
Mayor William Wells is running for governor of a 'seaside' Savannah, Georgia. If you look at Savannah on a map, there is no beachfront, at least no, Oceanic beachfront. Sure it rests close to the Atlantic but a barrier of wildlife preserves set it back from easy access. I'm assuming they filmed everything on the Savannah River. But this is a minor gripe in a film overflowing with ineptitude. Obviously, we know from a 1975 shark film that the Mayor is the villain. The powers of the town deem to continue business as usual even with a deadly shark on the prowl. The Last Shark gives us a second villain, news journalists. Who knew Enzo Castellari would predict our feelings of mainstream media 30 years ago? I almost feel as though the journalists are added into the story to complete the punchline of a joke normal people wouldn't understand until the internet. The reporter is talking about all the footage they'll have of the upcoming windsurfing regatta, and he tells the mayor that he'll have enough to make a Wells water sports documentary.
The mayor is treated differently in The Last Shark. Sure, he should have closed the beach. But he has 'shark-proof nets' installed, and he tries to make it as safe as possible. Our hero, Peter Benton, has a daughter who winds up loosing both of her legs in a shark attack. That attack was caused by the mayor's son taking out their boat to hunt the deadly predator. When the mayor sees all the damage he's caused, he decides to hunt the shark himself. So while, he's still an *sshole, he tries to do the right thing in the end. Our fake Quint even tells everyone the mayor did everything he could to keep the town safe. Unlike Jaws (1975), the mayor in The Last Shark gets what's coming to him. The shark takes a bite out of his cardboard cutout stunt double, then grabs the helicopter, and takes both back into the ocean.
Sidenote One of my favorite Jaws sayings was seen on a T-shirt and possibly originated from a Tweet by @adamgoodell "The mayor from Jaws is still the mayor in Jaws 2. It is so important to vote in your local elections."
Speaking of the daughter losing her legs. You know when you lose your legs in a shark attack and your dad keeps telling
stories about how you used to ride your bike, fall down, and get back up... with your legs! There are some gems here. There's a fake Bob Dylan promoting Wells as gubernatorial candidate in an Uncle Sam costume which says that no matter how hard Dylan tried, the Italians saw him as the paramount of western ideology. That one's a little too deep. How about the fact that our fake Quint's name is Ron? Yep, he's the original Captain Ron. He does not get a hero's death. Ron is tangled in cords, dragged away by the shark, shows up later as a corpse, his friend feeds his corpse to the shark, shark eats his body that is wearing a belt of explosives, and friend blows up body and shark. If you though the cardboard cutout version of the mayor being eaten was bad, or when the shark bumps a boat 20 feet into the air with a cardboard person attached, then you'll love the cardboard shark that breaks in half when it explodes.
There are several elements that make The Last Shark an entertaining watch. When an abandoned boat is found, they bring it back to the harbor. In this sequence, count how many times the owner of the boat's name is mentioned. The scene feels like this: Oh, that's Ed Glover's boat, not Ed Glover. No Ed Glover wouldn’t get his boat stuck. Ed Glover knew about those rapids. Yeah, Ed Glover was a good man. Do you guys think that's Ed Glover's boat. Oop, that's Ed Glover's arm alright. The only man in his mid-forties to still wear his high school ring. But the director of The Inglorious Bastards (1978), Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968), and 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) inserts one shot that tries to raise the bar of the entire film. We see two beach bums, one destroying the beauty of a guitar and the other sipping a beer trying not to cut off her ears. Then the camera zooms out, and we realize we've been watching the bums through a BBQ grill on the beach. This shot, subtly telling us, those bums are about to be shark food. If that isn't enough for you to waste an hour and a half on an atrocious shark movie rip-off of Jaws and Jaws 2 (1978), then maybe seeing our hero punch a journalist for no reason will do it for you. The villainous reporters want to do something crazy, they want to film the shark attacking. Our hero, who wouldn't know the reporter's plot because he was in a separate movie plot, punches the guy when asked about how he feels. We can infer that the punch was for the reporter's nefarious deeds, but it would have been more fitting if Benton's wife got to punch him, like Holly McClane in Die Hard (1988), since she was directly affected by his actions.
If for any reason, you watch this, which I cannot recommend, please do so as homework for your viewing of Cruel Jaws (1995). I'm retroactively watching the Cruel Jaws source material. Next up: Deep Blood (1990). And a shout out to Tubi. If you're looking for rare or hard to find horror, Tubi usually has it.
DEEP BLOOD (1990)
dir: Joe D'Amato
Original director Raffaele Donato decided directing was too hard or knew that Deep Blood was going to be a total piece of sh*t, so he left the film only a week or so into production. The film's producer Joe D'Amato stepped back into the director's chair to complete the most boring entry into the Italian Sharksploitation boom. D'Amato is not known for boring his audiences. With 197 directing credits including at least seven Emanuelle films, the disturbing Beyond The Darkness (1979), and Absurd (1981), it's hard to understand how dull his shark film became. While we're on the subject of his filmmography, it's funny to see that on a great horror film such as Absurd (1981), that he uses a psuedonym; whereas when he made a few horror porn films such as Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead (1980) or Porno Holocaust (1981) he proudly signed them Joe. We understand the desire to pass films off as American, but why not try to pass your porn off as American too?
For this Italian Jaws (1975) knockoff we get the beaches of Florida and several areas of the Mississippi River in Mississippi. Some of the underwater scenes were filmed in Rome, Ventotene Island, and in New Orleans. It all shows, seams and all. When characters are swimming in the 'ocean,' we can see the tacky backgrounds in whatever aquarium they're wading in. The shark attacks are done with a squirt of blood in the water with a mix of splashing around. That's it. No shark interaction.
There's a lot of plot but none of the key characteristics of a good shark knockoff. Instead, we have children making an oath to destroy a water monster that a mysterious native American tells them about. They meet decades later and fulfill their oath. Now that I write that out, it sounds like the plot of Stephen King's It. This story could be interesting if we cared, but we don't. If you think you'd enjoy nearly twenty minutes of scuba diving with peaceful meditative music following three dudes set up dynamite traps to stop a shark, then maybe this film is for you. Full disclosure, when this sequence was playing out, I was Googling how dynamite works underwater. My search didn't yield too many fruitful results. In some media, Acme cartoon style dynamite sticks with white fuses aren't allowed to get wet. Or they become volatile when aged or the elements get to them such as Wages of Fear (1953). But media has shown us that there is dynamite fishing. You light it, toss it, BOOM, and a bevy of dead fish. One thing I do know is that when these three lads set their traps the dynamite is not connected by an electrical wire that is used later to set them all off. So I wasn't crazy to wonder if they were going to try to light the fuses of each set of TNT sticks. This is also a symptom of a long and drawn out sequence that gives the viewer nothing, nothing but time to contemplate things other than the plot.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't see Deep Blood, I'm just saying you really don't want to see the lamest shark footage ever filmed. There's also not even a laughable factor to it all. If your Melatonin isn't working and you're about to reach for the Valium, try Deep Blood instead. It should leave you less groggy in the morning.
This is a sub-section, of a sub-genre, that's even more narrowed by the country of origin. Since Jaws (1975), filmmakers from everywhere have been trying to copy the glory of an exploitation blockbuster. In most arenas, filmmakers attempted to veil their plagiarism by using a different animal. Whether it's a bear like Grizzly (1976), a whale like Orca (1977), or killer fish like Piranha (1978). These films wanted a piece of the Jaws pie. While these filmmakers attempted subtlety, others went for the shark plot. Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) was the first after Jaws, but this film sets itself apart by making the shark the sympathetic character. It is one of the only in the sharksploitation cycle to give sympathy to the apex predator. After Mako there was a made-for-TV rip-off Shark Kill (1976), a Mexican-British knockoff Tintorera (1977), then the great sequel was made. Once there was a Jaws 2 (1978), the floodgates opened and we have the beginning of the ultra-niche sub-genre Italian Sharksploitation. This cycle begins with The Last Shark (1981) and ends with Cruel Jaws (1995).
Here's the reading list: The Last Shark (1981), Monster Shark (1986), Night of the Sharks (1988), Deep Blood (1990), and Cruel Jaws (1995). While I have yet to see Lamberto Bava's Monster Shark or Tonino Ricci's Night of the Sharks with Treat Williams, I can say with confidence Cruel Jaws is hands down the winner. Now, once I hunt down the last two Italian shark films, I may have to retract this editorial. But for now, Cruel Jaws has all the fun you want out of a B-A-D movie. And if that wasn't enough, it has actual footage from the rest and from Jaws. This makes it a clipshow, a copyright infringement field day, and an absurdists dream come true. Try mixing and matching all the sharks to make one Great-ish White. An honorable mention has to go to The Last Shark. People always talk about when the shark pops out of the water in Jaws, well in The Last Shark it is all about when the boat pops out of the water with the cardboard cut-out human being attached. It's easier just to show it:
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