Just as I sometimes will avoid a movie that’s too over-hyped, knowing that most movies can’t live up to the buzz, I occasionally will see movies that everyone is dumping on, especially if there’s some conflicting or interesting angle to the criticisms.

For Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis I saw one review that said only “Free popcorn refills” and another claiming that Coppola had reached Neil Breen levels. But our very own Eris said she kinda loved it, and I knew, at a minimum, Coppola would lard the movie up with cinematic references, which appeal to humble fans of cinema such as yours truly.

I then compounded my woes by going to see Joker 2—I’m not typing out that French crap—and what I can honestly say about both films that Pitch Meeting covered both very accurately. In-between, I saw the restoration of 2006’s The Fall, which is a beautiful masterpiece and it got me to thinking about how the other two films failed on fundamentals without being beautiful enough to make their flaws overlookable.

Megalopolis

For fifty  years, until the release of Star Wars in 1977, Metropolis was the science-fiction movie, and is still one of the great cinematic achievements. Even today, it impresses, and it’s quite easy to forget that its underlying message, spelled out in a literal epitaph is:

“The mediator between the HAND and the BRAIN must be the HEART.”

In this case, the HAND is Communism and the BRAIN is Fascism. It’s 1927 Germany, what else could they say? Nonetheless, the ham-handed messaging practically destroys this classic.

So while it is not surprising that Coppola would take that film as the germ for what would be his magnum opus, it’s somewhat surprising that he would say “Only my movie is going to have EVEN MORE painfully inappropriate or inapt epitaphs.”

This is not his magnum opus, mind you. But it was to have been. And as I watched, I could see glimpses of his original fever-dream, a vision of a three-day cinematic experience which chronicles the rise and fall and rise of Cesar Catalina, the architect of Megalopolis, a—well, a borough in New York, apparently.

It could’ve been great: Cesar would rise from the streets to power through his sheer ability culminating in evicting all the people who already lived in the place where Megalopolis was. That’d be the first movie. The second would be his struggles in getting Megalopolis built, securing financing and running afoul of city politics threatening to end his dream. The last movie would have him thwarting his enemies and achieving dream: An advanced city of…moving sidewalks. (Coppola did the writing by himself, with an assist from son Roman, and that was a mistake.)

But the first half of this movie has tremendous charm. Like the best of bad movies, it surprises you with novel ways of being bad. Cesar (Adam Driver) can stop time! This is a metaphor for creative ability, and the only bearing it has on anything is that his love interest (Nathalie Emmanuel) can see him do this.

The rules for this time-stopping are very vague, to boot.

Not weird enough? Well, Cesar carries a bunch of roses to his apartment and when he walks in, they fly off on their own.

There’s enough in the first third or so to keep things interesting. But then we start getting into plot, which we really didn’t need and which drags the movie down.

The mixing of Shakespearean dialogue (Cesar actually does most of “To Be Or Not To Be” speech at one point) and modern vulgar slang works very poorly and most actors are not up to it. Driver actually does. It’s hard not to respect him for pulling off reciting what is essentially gibberish. (The other one who manages is Aubrey Plaza, who chews the scenery and spits out the nails as Cesar’s jilted lover, and the seductress of Shia LeBeouf, in a particularly porny scene.)

Fundamentally, though, the premise is based on the ultimate left-wing conceit: That a perfect environment will make perfect people. The wretched refuse that Cesar has rendered homeless are, one presumes, going to occupy Megalopolis even as, moments earlier, they threatened to burn it down.

But it’s not a bad looking film. There are moments that are quite nice, visually.

It was better in Coppola’s head for sure.

Joker: Folie à Deux

By comparison with Megalopolis, Joker 2 is much more successful at what it’s trying to do, and also much harder to watch. The conceit of having Arthur (Joquin Phoenix) hallucinate that he’s in a musical no one can see, except for Lee (Lady Gaga), who joins in it with him, is actually a clever way to avoid having to do lots of wordy emotional scenes between two crazy people. The choice of upbeat music, particularly themed around showtunes, is also a clever way to get the idea across.

And the idea is, Arthur, who’s not The Joker, has a cult following that is dedicated to The Joker. Lee’s attraction to him is based on him being The Joker. The world is more-or-less at his feet, if only he’ll be The Joker. So our little sad sack of an anti-hero-but-also-not-really-a-hero is given the choice of being even crazier or trying to just, y’know, be himself (which is crazy enough).

This movie has a lot of the original movie’s sense of style, evoking pseudo-1981, and the same miserable premise is here: watching a man struggle with his sanity in a cruel and brutal world.

This really doesn’t work as entertainment. There are many, many elements of the original that deflect from the misery porn: We sort of root for Arthur. Until we’re shown exactly how crazy and dangerous he is, we can kind of believe he’s turning his life around. He’s moving around the city, doing things. He’s trying to achieve his dreams and handling his failures by hallucinating. It’s something, at least.

Here, he goes back-and-forth between an asylum and a court room.

In a traditional musical, the song-and-dance numbers stop the action. This is also true of Joker 2, except that there was no action to stop. And the musical numbers are uncomfortable to interpret, much like if the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene in Clockwork Orange was the entire movie.

I realized early on, the only way to get through the movie was going to be to really pay attention to those musical numbers. That’s where the “action” was, the evolution of the relationship between Lee and Arthur was, as well as his struggle with his identity. So I wasn’t bored, though I wasn’t exactly enchanted, either.

The Boy hated it pretty hard. He doesn’t know the songs, and found that the whole identity struggle was neutered by the fact that the movie makes it very clear early on: Arthur is not Joker. He’s not wrong about this. It’s almost as if the creators were afraid to give Arthur an opportunity to at least toy with being wildly evil.

I would recommend this film to even fewer people than the original. If the two films together average half-a-billion, that’s still way too much.

The Fall (2006)

I have a full review up this film up from 2006, one of the first I wrote during the blogging era, and the Boy and I trundled down to catch it, thinking it was a one-night deal. (It actually got a little wider release, I guess because it’s a 4K restoration.)

It’s a masterpiece. Visually stunning, and using a child’s perspective as creative license, the story is both whimsical and grimly serious. I had a stye when I saw it, and had forgotten it was a tearjerker. Then my eye started stinging like crazy. Besides the beauty of this film, it handles tone shifts expertly. The little girl is a little girl and prone to silly things, and the story he tells her is very silly.

She also makes childish mistakes in trying to help him kill himself. She doesn’t know quite what he’s doing, but she knows something is off. And the switch from the whimsical to the grave is heart-wrenching.

But it’s a joyful movie overall, and well worth watching. Director Tarsem (Singh) will probably never make anything like this ever again—probably no one will. But that’s okay, this is a genuine magnum opus that knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it excellently.

Also Screened:

There were an assortment of movies, both bad and beautiful—actually, they were all pretty good, which isn’t a huge surprise given they were all-but-two reissues of films we liked. I may review one of these for next time.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988): A standard invaders-from-space story is enlivened by making the aliens literal clowns. There’s an oh-so-brief suggestion that human clowns were inspired by these invaders in the past, but just enough to allow our characters to take the adventure seriously. A limited budget meant that a couple of truly great effects were left on the cutting room floor, but for ’80s horror-comedy, this still shines and is very watchable and entertaining. The Chiodo brothers have been threatening a sequel for decades, and IMDB says they’re in production, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024): Among the many spectacular flops of 2024, Lisa Frankenstein goes overlooked. It made less than $10M on a $13M budget, so it can’t compare with either Megalopolis (less than $10M on a $120M budget) or Joker 2 (less than $60M on an alleged $200M budget), and it’s also much easier to watch as a film. It’s got a sort of Edward Scissorhands/Heathers feel and even takes place in 1989. The tonal shifts can make things feel uneven and I’m not sure if the ending made sense, exactly, but it already has a cult following, which is why I took the Barbarienne to see it. (I was the only XY chromosome in the place.) Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin.

Ringu (1998): This horror classic is weathering a bit like the old Universal classics. It’s kind of slow-moving and low-key, and suffering from its own considerable influence on the genre. It’s still good and enjoyable, but the “wow” factor isn’t there anymore.

Smile 2: The original Smile is far from a great movie—Jump Scare: The Movie, I think I called it—but it won both the Boy and I over for a couple of reasons. First, the people making it cared. This is someone’s baby, and none of it is phoned in. Second, while the beats are mostly pretty predictable, it commits and gives us a Smile monster, so we don’t have to go into the whole “well, was there REALLY a monster?” and “Maybe the real monster is the friends we made along the way!” We both had dim hopes the sequel would be able to sustain this but, by-and-large, it works well, maybe even a little better than the original. The Boy did not care for the end, which is telegraphed way early on, but is not really possible with this genre of horror. (I mentioned in my review of the first, that this is my least favorite genre of horror, and I can’t say why without spoiling it. Same here.)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964): Part of Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle,” pretty much the best movies he made (along with “The Intruder”), and at the height of his directorial powers. Vincent Price is a decadent Italian baron who torments his peasants and brings a pretty young girl in to seduce while he tortures her father and boyfriend. Orgies abound, and the dreaded Red Death sweeps the countryside. Price actually is an avowed Satanist here, convinced that The Devil has killed God and will spare him from the Red Death if he sacrifices enough people to it. Slow by modern standards, with beautiful costumes and sets, and “exteriors” that are (wonderfully) painted soundstages, it was refreshing and held up well.

Terrifier 3: With a $2M budget and looking to pass Joker 2 at the domestic box office with over $50M in ticket sales, this movie is an even unlikelier success than Joker. I’ve waxed enthusiastic about Terrifier 2, though I am no gore-hound, because I think it really transcends its own genre. Terrifier 3 is not, to my mind, as good, but it’s still quite good. It feels more realistically brutal, which makes it harder to watch, but the main focus of the film is showing the aftermath of the previous series of events, which turned Lauren LaVera into a basket case. Certainly worth seeing, and maybe re-seeing, because there are a lot of interesting details. If you can stomach the gore, it’s a good film.

I’m a fan of Joe Bob Briggs, the premier drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, going back to the ’80s when I first caught a glimpse of him on The Movie Channel. By the ’90s, when yours truly had more or less stopped caring what was on TV, you could find me in front of the set at crazy hours on Saturday nights watching whatever crapola they had given him to host. A brief correspondence with him during my technical writing years cemented my affection for the man, who has been genuine and supportive to everyone I’ve come across who ever interacted with him.

But it wasn’t until I hauled my butt out to the Drive-In Jamboree that I considered myself a mutant, which is a name that comes from a one-man show JBB did in the ’80s, where he had people take the Mutant Oath. This begins, “We are Drive-In Mutants.” The groups I consider myself a member of (the moron horde, the jackals of 372 pages, and the drive-in mutants) may reflect on my self-image.

What was a gag forty years ago has taken on depth, especially in the past six years since a fan (now Darcy The Mail Girl) exhorted him to revive the show, and a marathon turned into a six-, soon to be seven-year run.

Your humble correspondent immensely enjoyed the second and third jamborees (the first sold out before I could get tickets), and was shocked to discover there almost wasn’t a fourth one. They were turning into big, expensive, elaborate events—I actually have no doubt they could have become something akin to Comic-Con—when what JB had wanted was for them to be a place where he and Darcy got together with the mutants to watch movies and talk about him.

So, he quit.

Darcy, on the other hand, refused to quit and started doing the con on her own. She’s the one who gets letters from the mutants telling her how important the meet-ups are. She was going to throw it with her own time and money, and drag JB there to host, whether he liked it or not. JB ultimately caved, but with the caveat: They would put up tickets—no guests, no bands, no program whatsoever—and see if people were interested in coming. Were they there for the program, or were they there for the mutants and movies.

Tickets sold like hotcakes: We were there for the movies and each other.

As much as I loved the previous years, the vibe this year was perfect. Being about the movies and the mingling made everything feel more relaxed. The music was fan music, and surprisingly delightful. The show started at a reasonable time—I didn’t notice if it was late or not. I don’t think too late because the sun was barely down. It also ran late, but nobody who is a Drive-In fan expected any less. We like to talk about stuff. A lot.

They had no sponsors this year and didn’t offer much in the way of incentives for featured guests (and some turned them down), but they ended up with a stunning line-up. Svengoolie showed up (free of charge) and hosted Saturday night’s offerings of six classic universal horrors: Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Creature From The Black Lagoon. JBB is a wealth of movie trivia, of course, but Svengoolie was absolutely stunning in the “Horror Host Havoc” competition where each offered factoids about the movies and the audience decided who the loser was by pelting him with rubber chickens.

The previous night had ended with the three most iconic scream queens of the ’80s: Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer, who were inducted into the Scream Queen Hall of Fame, which is totally a thing or will be one day. To me, this was perhaps the best line-up possible, after the previous year’s Roger Corman tribute. Bauer stayed to the end (around 6AM!) and showed up the next day for signings, and your humble correspondent was bowled over by her charm and graciousness.

John Carpenter, Master of Horror

Friday night began, however, with John Carpenter. Which was as improbable as it was perfect.

Some of us were somewhat apprehensive about Carpenter. He’s famously curmudgeonly and reluctant to do these kinds of things, and we didn’t know how he’d feel about us. But he’d come down for free, agreeing to open the first movie and left after the intro to the second. He seemed somewhat surprised that JB had chosen to air Prince of Darkness at all, much less first, but JB pointed out that JC has gotten a ton of questions about The Thing, and Prince of Darkness is a much more mysterious movie.

And on seeing him in person, reacting to a variety of JB and the audience’s questions, I’d describe him less as curmudgeonly and more as uninterested in bullshit. And that includes his own. There were numerous places he could’ve launched into some pretentious arty nonsense and—well, he just didn’t. JB asked how he (“no offense but I’m not [Republican]”) could work with Kurt Russell (“to the right of Genghis Khan”) and he just said, “We just don’t talk about it.”

This used to be common wisdom.

Anyway, I think we won him over, and he certainly won us over, treating the audience questions respectfully and signing a Michael Meyers figure for a teen fan who had come up on stage to shake his hand.

Prince of Darkness

Sometimes I think Prince of Darkness is the most heretical film possible, even though it’s not excessively violent, hardly sexual at all, and fairly restrained in terms of language. But it’s also strangely conservative and anti-gnostic, with the idea being that God (like the tribal O.T. Jehovah) walked the earth, but rather than being loving and benevolent was, in Carpenter’s words “pissed off”. Somehow he gets cast out to the “dark side”—the mirror universe—but leaves behind his son, Satan, which is evil in material form.

We get into college bull-session territory from there as Jesus turns out to have been a space alien warning humans about this and trapping Satan in a container, with the idea that man will eventually evolve scientifically enough to find a way to secure and handle this evil in the future. The Church ends up being the guardian of the container and the promulgator of the lie about a good universe.

When the story begins, the last caretaker of the container dies and it begins to leak. And the quantum physics professor talking about how our concept of reality breaks down at the subatomic level is the guy who knows how to handle the substance, which can reverse entropy and possess people and emanate controlling force at a distance, while the heroes receive warning messages sent via tachyon particles into dreams from the far distant year of 1999, where things have gone to hell. If Satan gets loose, he’ll be bringing in papa from the darkside, and he’s perfectly happy to distract our heroes by possessing them and having them be menaced by street people (led by Alice Cooper).

Basically, we have an almost “Evil Dead” style situation of monsters being outside the church and anyone on the inside also potentially being a monster, which a bunch of novel horror effects both visual and intellectual, to keep things interesting. Some of these implications don’t work out, or they suggest a movie that’s superversive more than subversive.

That is, as the priest (Donald Pleasance) explains the Church’s role and beats it up for its dishonesty, the priests and especially the nuns have a “holy warrior” vibe. They are, after all, holding off the Devil and his demiurge father single-handedly, making a civilization where evil can be defeated technologically.

Another possibility is that the protagonists are in the mirror-universe—but again, it implies an inherent goodness in Man that is so powerful, it can operate in a universe which is made of evil.

I don’t think it quite achieves what it’s striving for. For one thing, the main romance (between “Simon & Simon”‘s Jameson Parker and the late Lisa Blount), while being a very typical Carpenterian romance (boy meets girl, they have sex) doesn’t have the chemistry of, say, Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall, Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis, or Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau.

If we contrast with The Thing, one of the things that works so well there is the struggle to survive personally balanced with the concern that’s one own survival could mean the death of humanity. The individual need to survive needs to be strong to be relatable, and I’m not sure we feel that in Prince of Darkness.

Prince of Darkness is the second of Carpenter’s “apocalypse trilogy”, which ends with In The Mouth of Madness). The first film in the trilogy is The Thing.

The Thing

The Thing was the thing (heh) that, in my opinion, derailed Carpenter’s career. The attacks on this film were truly outrageous, labeling it literal pornography, and WB naturally panicked and botched an almost guaranteed sleeper hit. An excellent adventure-horror or what we’d now call “survival horror”, I remember being slightly disappointed when I first saw it because of the ending. I now think the ending is perfect, and the re-emergence of this scene in the current election season explains why:

When you get past the action, the suspense, the tension, and the amazing special effects—Carpenter basically credited Rob Bottin with The Thing’s artistic success—something still remains, and is still relevant. To with, we have a closely knit society where trust is necessary for survival.

It’s quickly undermined, and the last scene underscores it beautifully, as two humans quietly freeze to death (maybe) because they can’t trust each other. (They have to both be humans, because there’s no reason for the alien to leave just one human alive.)

Even this is an over-simplification. There are other possibilities, like they’re both infected (but not yet consumed) and the thing is just lurking, waiting for its chance to spring itself on the rest of the world.

The Drive-In Academy Lifetime Achievement Award: The Hubbie

But Carpenter doesn’t really make message movies. Even They Live, which he wanted to tie into an anti-Reagan message (according to Roddy Piper, who refused), today comes across as a documentary, and an apolitical one at that, at least to those of us who are wearing our special sunglasses.

Listening to him talk reminds me a little bit of listening to Bukowski or Frazetta, in the sense that he’s very down-to-earth while at the same time tapping into a sublime artistic spirit that exists on its own plane. And if I can claim any personal experience with it from writing, I notice that what I think I’m writing about always ends up taking a back seat to (or being completely controverted by) the story that’s actually there.

“Our logic…collapses into ghosts and shadows,” as Victor Fong lectures in The Prince of Darkness.

I think Carpenter was genuinely touched by our enthusiasm, and got a little sense of who we are (not really having an idea before, which, how can you blame him?), and received the Hubbie gracefully and gratefully. (Traditionally, the award is a Cadillac hubcap, but in this case it was from a ’57 Plymouth Fury, after Christine.)

Somehow, it was perfect that he would be here for this reformation of the Jamboree: No fanfare, no big bucks, just a bunch of weirdos who like movies getting together to watch them and talk about them.