Posted Feb 8, 10 02:31 PM
SCHLOCK!
[shlok] n. Something of cheap or inferior quality; junk.
There's a scene in Ed Wood in which the titular Grade Z filmmaker has pilfered a rubber octopus from a studio prop warehouse in order to stage a renegade night shoot. His fallen star is, of course, Bela Lugosi, who approaches the scene as if preparing for Macbeth. Ever the sport, the Hungarian thespian climbs into a makeshift pool to wrestle the creature. Buuuuuut there's a slight problem: the director forgot to steal the motor. And Lugosi's epic "struggle" reaches the height of a legendary low.
Now that's shlock, a.k.a. camp. Or as fellow UCF film alum Ed Sanchez once coined - "good cheese."
Back in the day, student Ed would wade deep into the bargain rental bins at campus video stores, passing Christopher Atkins' work in Shakma (poor Roddy McDowall) and Beaks: The Movie. Which is not to be confused, mind you, with Slugs: The Movie. Ed'd drag back the bottomfeeders you've never heard of, titles with cardboard production values ballyhooed by Joe Bob Briggs, the kind of fodder somehow gloriously unaware of how bad they reeeeeeally were. Good cheese, indeed. Ed and his roommates would pop beer caps on the kitchen countertops, yucking up entire weekends of Claude Akins film festivals. Until I introduced them - their eyes manna'ed - to Sextette, Mae West's comeback as a sex symbol at the age of 83.
Hey, sometimes you just want that baloney sandwich.
Face it: Viewing life would be unrelentingly dull and antiseptic if every movie's credit read "Directed by David Lean." So what a relief to take a break with a movie whose makers think they're David Lean - but will nev-uh, ev-uh be.
But let's first clarify. Schlock, yes, may be classified as "B-movie" or "trash", but don't confuse it with "crap" or "garbage". Schlock should never know that it's schlock, and no one who makes schlock ever sets out to make schlock. (Like Ben Affleck following up Good Will Hunting by starring opposite Peter O'Toole in...Phantoms???) The same is true with camp. Beware of one-joke movies that deliberately try to be "funny" bad movies, like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Five minutes in, you'll realize that the only thing close to a laugh was wasted on the titles.
"Crap" and "garbage" denote bad movies that are truly wastes of time - the reprehensible. A midnight anniversary screening of Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione's Caligula, the $16 million soft-core spectacle set in Ancient Rome, quickly put the remaining crowd - curious to see what lured in cast members Malcolm McDowell AND Helen Mirren AND Peter O'Toole AND John Gielgud - in a dire, joyless mood. And try as I may, I just can't bring myself to rent Maniac!. Make up technician (and Vietnam vet) Tom Savini has made a career out of engineering incredible realistic and - frequently - gory, censor-pushing effects. But every time I've even considered the nasty box - Plot: psycho scalps women to dress his mannequin - I hastily return it to the rack, an uneasy wave of shame and uncleanliness coming over me. Although it takes a lot to shock me, there are images - and the tone of them - that I just don't want in my head.
Schlock doesn't have that ugliness to it because the attempted charade is, in itself, ridiculous. It's a comfortable blanket to not "buy the movie" and, bemused, watch all concerned struggle to make it work.
It's the difference between the modern haunted house classic, Poltergeist, which deserves textbook retrospectives...and the first of two inferior sequels, Poltergeist II: The Other Side. In the follow-up, the credits actually bill a "Vomit Monster", and ludicrous scene comes after ludicrous scene...one in which young Oliver Robbins is mummified by the stray threads of his braces (?!), the metal strands reaching...(as his mother screams) dangerously...closer...to the light socket.
Schlock 'til you drop.
It's modest efforts like Venom. Heavyweights - Sarah Miles, Oliver Reed, Nicol Williamson, and Sterling Hayden - slum in a Jaws-ripoff involving kidnappers trapped in a house with a black mamba lurking in the vents. Not a bad set-up, but the finale channels Ed Wood. This time, it's the great-grate Klaus Kinski screaming at the top of his lungs, wrestling a big rubber snake.
Oliver Reed was like last generation's Lance Henriksen, a working actor effortlessly moving between great films and the truly, truly awful (Henriksen followed up The Right Stuff with James Cameron's debut, Pirannha II: The Spawning). Also circa the early '80s, Reed appeared opposite Peter Fonda - who has a ridiculous scene in a greenhouse, armed with a rake - in the atrociously-titled Spasms. As horror goes, that's The Milagro Beanfield War of bad movie names. Just imagine the polite coffee conversation with friends and relatives of the filmmaker.
"Ohhhhhhh, so-and-so tells me you're directing a movie. What's it called?"
"Uh...Spasms."
"....Ohhhhhhh" (turning away to get a macaroon)
To be fair, the plot involves some kind of expedition that brings back a colossal snake monster with whom Reed has a dangerous telepathic connection. You know...I thought I was being fair, but describing it made it sound even more wretched. One rarely sees the creature, only people running from the fish-eye lens of the stalking camera while whooshes and growls liberally pepper the soundtrack.
But no one hyperventilates a whisper like Reed. At one point, electrodes wired to his sweaty forehead, he relays the p.o.v. of the serpent god's latest victim. As a prosthetic face bubbles up, we cut back to Reed, who breathlessly exclaims, "My God...he's-he's bloating!!!"
And THAT is the kind of laugh that no comedy can trigger.
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 02:31 PM