288. Single Room Furnished

288. Single Room Furnished (1966)
Director: Matt Cimber
Writers: Matt Cimber and Michael Musto from the play by Gerald Sanford
From: Cult Cinema

The story of a woman’s life told through three instances of love and heartbreak.

Single Room Furnished is the last movie Jayne Mansfield filmed before her death and that detail adds the exploitation element. Whereas the other movies in these sets are obviously exploitation—slasher, blaxploitation, sex comedies—this is exploiting her death. It even opens with an introduction by Walter Winchell eulogizing Mansfield. He’s supposed to add a gravitas, an importance to the film that the film itself doesn’t have. And the sincerity he brings to the eulogy feels like its own genre of exploitation.

The movie itself is pretty disappointing, both as Mansfield’s final performance and as a film itself. Much like the last movie I watched, Night Train to Terror, this is essentially an anthology film, only instead of horror, it’s a drama from three points in this woman’s life. The frame narrative is Pop, the super in an apartment building, telling Maria stories about Mansfield’s life for… reasons? The movie wants to be a morality tale of Maria learning a lesson from Mansfield’s life, but Mansfield doesn’t make any rash decisions. She’s unlucky in love and suffers for it.

The first story is about Frankie and Johnnie. Mansfield, in this story, is Johnnie (short for Johanna). The pair are married and talking on the fire escape outside their apartment. They reminisce about how they met and Frankie talks about wanting to get out of New York and see the world. The next morning, Frankie’s gone and, as Pop tells us in voice over, Johnnie loses the baby.

Oh yeah, Johnnie was pregnant. They didn’t mention that in the scene either.

The second story is about Flo and Charlie, another couple that lives in the building. Flo is trying to get Charlie to ask her out despite him being a “confirmed bachelor.” Finally she asks him out, but he’s “too bashful” to pick her up.

*cough* “Confirmed bachelor” is a euphemism for “gay.”

A few days later, Flo finds Charlie in a bar and he tells her (story within a story) about Mae (Mansfield) visiting and telling him she’s pregnant. He ends up asking Mae to marry him, changes his mind after talking to Flo. Proposes to Flo.

Flo comes down to the super’s apartment, sends the super to deal with Charlie, and tells Maria the rest of the story: She and Charlie offered to adopt the baby, but Mae gave it away to some other couple. After that, Mae started going by “Eileen.”

Eileen’s story is she’s a sex worker and comes home to find Billy in her apartment. He’s one of her customers that’s become obsessed. He says he loves her and proposes marriage, but he’s not listening to her say no. Finally he threatens her with a gun, but leaves and shoots himself instead.

Maria makes up with her mom and one of Eileen’s customers from the bar comes looking for Eileen. THE END

So Maria, who was fighting with her mother at the beginning for cramping her style has made up with her, but there’s no lesson to take from Mansfield’s story except maybe enjoy your innocence while it lasts. She doesn’t make any poor choices. In fact, she seems to deal with people honestly and gets poorly used because of it.

The movie itself was adapted from a stageplay and it has that look. Just lots of people talking to each other without moving and constantly relating information in monologue. The whole thing’s just inert. Mansfield is fine, but the roles that she’s given and lines she has to say in this movie are so overwrought. At times it feels like the writer or director was aiming for a Blanche DuBois from Streetcar and missed by miles.

I’d say this flick is only for Mansfield completists, but they would have already seen it. So skip it. The whole thing is kind of embarrassingly boring and the eulogy at the top makes watching it feel not quite ghoulish, but certainly unseemly.

287. Night Train to Terror

287. Night Train to Terror (1985)
Directors: John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas
Writer: Phillip Yordan
From: Drive-In

A horror anthology where God and Satan haggle over the souls whose various stories make up the anthology.

Anthology films are generally hard to do because you’re trying to grab the audience’s attention, hold it, and bring a narrative to a satisfying conclusion. Then you have to do that at least twice more. However, horror kind of lends itself to the anthology format. I think I’ve said it elsewhere on the blog, but horror is much more about tone than character or plot. With a short piece, you can excel at relating a tone and idea and then getting out before anyone starts to ask questions.

None of which applies to this movie which is just silly when it’s not boring.

Night Train to Terror is an anthology, but it’s not comprised of shorts. Instead, it’s comprised of edited and shortened versions of three other films. Rather than have a short film that has its own beginning, middle, and end, you get three summaries of films, often with extended voice-overs to explain what’s going on.

The frame narrative is God and Satan riding a train and examining cases of individual souls. The “cases” are the three movies that make up this movie. Meanwhile, the train is going to crash at dawn, killing the rock band performing in the next car. They just sing one song, over and over, and, by the end, you’re begging for that crash.

The first story is about a guy who’s kidnapped by evil scientists. They inject him with some mind-control drug and send him out to roofie and kidnap women. This is not only to give the movie lots of context-free nudity, it’s also so the scientists can torture, murder, and then sell the women’s bodies to medical schools. One doctor turns on the other, the guy slips from their control, and all the bad guys get killed. There’s no sense of character or even any sense of what’s going on, so the whole sequence is pretty dull.

The second story is about a man who falls in love with a porno actress. He hunts her down, they get together, but her boss doesn’t want to give her up. So he invites them into the “Death Club” where members subject themselves to Rube Goldberg-ian forms of Russian Roulette: releasing a lethal bug to sting someone in the room, strapping themselves into electric chairs while a computer decides which one get the shock, and laying in sleeping bags under a swinging wrecking ball whose cord is being cut.

This story has more voice-over than the other two because so much of the original movie is glossed. The man bows out of the club after the insect incident, but the boss has him kidnapped at gun point twice to endure the other two. Which don’t kill the guy. Or the boss. So what was the point?

The final story is a movie I already reviewed on the Misery Mill, The Nightmare Never Ends. While this condensed version adds stop-motion monsters that are not in the original, it strips what little sense there was from the original. You still have this demon/Satan surrogate living his immortal life on Earth. A Holocaust survivor tries to kill him and dies instead. This leads Detective Cameron Mitchell (may his name be praised) to investigate and figure out who the demon is. Meanwhile Richard Moll has written a book arguing that God is Dead and his wife is told she must do the work of ridding the world of Satan. Everyone dies except the wife who tries to kill the demon, but butchers someone else instead.

I said at the end of that review that, “With the right perspective and group of friends, this could all be entertainingly bad,” and I’d double-down on that for this movie. The whole approach and sense of gravitas throughout is pretty silly and the stop-motion monsters look deliciously bad. This version, altogether, is much funnier than The Nightmare Never Ends, although it’s still a bad movie. With some chips and beer, though, it’d be great for some Halloween fun.

286. My Tutor

286. My Tutor (1983)
Director: George Bowers
Writer: Joe Roberts
From: Cult Cinema

Bobby’s dad hires a French tutor to help Bobby get into Yale, but she may end up teaching him more than just French.

Jesus, another Marimark Production and another movie with a student hooking up with their teacher. Have I offended some vindictive cosmic force?

Anyway, this is directed by the same guy who did The Hearse, a Marimark movie I didn’t hate. Didn’t love it either. My opinion then was that the movie was fine if kind of baggy—there was little motive force within the production itself. The same could be said for this movie, except it’s a comedy, a genre that, arguably, needs more energy on screen than horror.

So, Bobby, a high school senior (played by a 24-year-old: director continues his penchant for elderly teens) fails his French exam. His rich father (played by Kevin McCarthy who’s too good for this movie) hires a tutor, Terry, to move into the house and give Bobby French lessons every day. If Bobby gets an 85 or better on the test, Terry gets a $10,000 bonus. This is important to note now even though it doesn’t come up again until the end of the movie.

From here, two plotlines alternate with each other. One is Bobby studying French, crushing on his tutor, and then the two of them hooking up. The other is Bobby’s friend Billy and Billy’s brother Jack, trying to get laid. They go to a brothel, meet up with (maybe) a sex worker, go to a mud wrestling match, and always fail with “hilarious” consequences.

No, the latter plot isn’t funny, but it ups the boob ratio in the movie helping it be more of the sex comedy that the producers clearly want it to be. Like most of these Marimark movies, it doesn’t rise (or sink) to the level of being a Skinemax flick, but there’s a constant leering quality about so much of it. From the very beginning, even. The opening cuts between Bobby failing his test and Terry at an aerobics class, the balance of time spent on the latter. Later, Bobby and Jack leer at the women in the class from the other side of a window. In case you had doubts of how to read the scene of long shots of women doing pelvic lifts in leotards, the movie is modeling your expected response.

The only interesting thing about the boys’ “antics” is that Jack is played by Crispin Glover. He brings the weird to the role and actually makes it a character. Other than Kevin McCarthy who’s doing the shouty dad/boss character he always does (and does well), Glover is the only person playing a character in the movie and making something of it. Even though they’re the scenes I’m most likely to cringe at, his presence made them the best part of the movie.

The main plot though: Bobby starts crushing on Terry, they get together, they’re harried by her ex-boyfriend who’s a scumbag, but isn’t really an issue. Once they start hooking up, the French lessons vanish from the film, which seems like an odd thing to note, but that test is the ticking clock. Bobby has to pass that test so how’s the preparation for that going? Movie drops it completely until the last fifteen minutes making the whole movie have no forward momentum at all.

Surprise, Bobby passes the test, but learns that Terry is getting a $10,000 bonus for her work and taking a trip to France. He throws a tantrum, rides off on his scooter, has an accident, and ends up at the house of a girl he crushed on throughout high school. The next morning, he comes home, makes up with Terry, and says good-bye. THE END

100% a don’t care-can’t care situation. This lands just outside of the creeper realm that The Teacher wallowed in because at least both characters are consenting adults (and played by people in their 20’s and 30’s), but I may only have that sense since the characters try to keep it a secret in this movie whereas the characters in The Teacher had the support of the parents.

Honestly, though, the movie’s just boring. It’s a comedy without any comedic energy so I can’t even get worked up about the weird gender and sexual stuff going on. Crispin Glover makes it interesting, but it’s easy enough to just fast-forward to the parts where he is since he’s dressed like Bertie Wooster throughout despite the contemporary setting. No surprise, I’m not recommending this Marimark Production.

285. My Chauffeur

285. My Chauffeur (1986)
Director: David Beaird
Writer: David Beaird
From: Cult Cinema

A woman is hired to be a chauffeur despite the other drivers’ objections. While her freewheeling attitude irks her employer, it wins her the admiration, and maybe even love, of her customers.

A Marimark Production so I was coming into this one angry. And it’s all right. It’s all right for an 80’s film. The jokes that don’t age badly—like the homophobia of her first client—land well and the pacing is pretty good throughout.

So the rich and elderly Mr. Witherspoon has a message delivered to Casey Meadows, our heroine, telling her to report to Witherspoon’s limo service the next morning for work. She arrives, looking very Cyndi Lauper, while the boss is giving a speech to the aging male drivers about how it’s their job to keep the forces of modernism and hedonism at bay. Timing *whomp whomp*

The slobs vs. snobs set-up is already laid out and really when the movie’s at its best. Boss gives her unpleasant assignments, she handles them in unexpected ways, and if the movie had just followed that path of her as a driver with various comic set pieces and her co-workers coming around to respect her, I’d have liked it more. In fact, my favorite scene is pretty much a throwaway sequence in that context that doesn’t impact the plot at all.

Casey is at a hot dog stand at the end of her shift and overhears a couple arguing. The girl is chewing the guy out for not having a car. We learn, through the dressing down, that they're supposed to be going to a classy party, he works as a janitor at a school, and he’s taking night classes on his way to being a lawyer. Casey comes up with the Rolls Royce and says she’s his driver, apologizing for being late. The scene never comes up again and it’s an obvious one for this kind of plot, but it has heart and, more than any other scene, reveals the core of Casey’s character. Otherwise she’s generally a bit manic and mugging for comedy.

However, that’s not the plot of the movie. Casey is hired to drive the boss’ business-obsessed asshole banker son to wine country. The car breaks down, they have to walk a long way while bickering, and end up hooking up that night. That transition to them making out doesn’t work because there’s been no chemistry between them, but whatever. The movie wants to be this movie.

The next morning, he asks her to marry him and she says “no” because she doesn’t know his name. They go back and forth over this for the rest of the movie with him not revealing his identity till the end. When dad finds out, he gets very nervous as did I because now the specter of incest is hanging over this picture.

Then Penn & Teller show up. Yes. That Penn & Teller. Teller is playing a Saudi ambassador (*sigh* why?) and Penn is a grifter who sneaks into the limo and takes Teller out for a night on the town. He gets all of Teller’s money, takes both him and Casey clubbing, and pays a few women to fool around with Teller in the limo. Teller gets dropped off back at his hotel and Penn sneaks away.

The scene doesn’t work because we’re not seeing Penn doing the interesting sleight-of-hand that the duo is known for and the whole sequence just runs kind of long. It couldn’t be cut, though, because Casey gets fired the next morning for “kidnapping the ambassador.” Asshole banker, who has become a much kinder boss to his employees in the interim, finds her and takes her to meet dad.

Dad reveals that she grew up in the house because she’s the daughter of his former housemaid. And that he’s her father.

There it is, there’s that incest.

The couple gets giddy over this with a, “we did something naughty” reaction, which is not the right reaction. However, the boss’ driver comes in with another driver that’s been particularly salty to Casey, and reveals that this driver is actually Casey’s father, not the boss. So it’s not incest and they can get married.

These revelations, by the way, come within a minute of each other in the last five minutes of the film.

Anyway, they get married, get in the limo, and Casey tells the driver to take them home. It’s her former boss from the limo company who says “Yes ma’am.” THE END

I could do without the incest and the love story in general. My big complaint with the love story is that the two don’t have any chemistry and there’s no transition from them bickering and blaming each other for being stranded to hooking up. I would have liked more comedic set pieces maybe culminating in some chauffeur’s challenge between her and one of the other drivers. I don’t know what that would look like, but it would have been more fun.

The movie is passably fun as it is, though, and I have to give it credit for that. The music is a little weak, which seems like an odd thing to note, but it reminded me how I would honestly buy a compilation of the soundtracks from these Marimark films. As much as I hate the movies, the songs are uniformly solid and catchy. The songs, frankly, even the title songs, sound like they have more effort and craft put into them than the movies they’re in. This flick, though, was the outlier. I found myself forgetting the songs as they were playing. Maybe it’s the fact that this movie legitimately felt like a movie and is a good time so the songs had a higher bar to warrant my attention. I’d say it’s a recommend.

284. Pick-Up

284. Pick-Up (1975)
Director: Bernard Hirschenson
Writer: John R. Winter
From: Cult Cinema

Carol and Maureen climb onto Chuck’s RV only to get stranded in a swamp and have, respectively, a romantic and spiritual experience.

We open with an extreme close up of a thumb on a belt buckle that pulls back to reveal a fly being unbuttoned. Chuck starts pissing against the RV that he's supposed to be delivering for a company. Lovely start. The initial shot is aesthetically interesting: blurry close-up on the belt buckle and the slow focus-pull makes for an interesting and unique image. The cinematography in the film is pretty solid and inventive. That the film imagines that its cinematography communicates something deep and meaningful instead of an overly-long stream of piss is also a wholly appropriate reading.

Carol and Maureen are sitting in a field watching. Carol gets his attention and asks for a ride while Maureen keeps meditating. Maureen says they shouldn’t get on the RV because Chuck is an Aries and it’ll be a “bad trip.” I immediately started repeating, “Please, please, please be a comedy.”

Then nothing happens until the last minute of the film.

I’m being both inaccurate and unfair. Nothing interesting or worth watching happens, but everything that does happen returns at the end in a way that’s both pointless and galling.

They drive, Carol gets the attention of some guys riding in the back of a pick-up truck and dances for them in the front window of the RV. Bad weather comes, the RV is sent down several detours, and gets stuck in the swamp. Chuck doesn’t call his boss to relate the problem or try to find someone nearby for help. Instead, he and Carol go traipsing through the swamp and hook up. Maureen stays with the RV reading the Tarot.

Several scenes focus on Maureen and visions she may be having. They may also be actual incidents. The confusion is because it's that kind of movie--you know, inept.

First, she’s told she’s the servant of Apollo. She finds an altar in the swamp, lies on it naked, and comes. Later there’s a flashback to her as a child playing the organ in a church (played by the adult Maureen except with pigtails). The priest comes in and molests her. (As the scene went on, I was less and less bothered that they put this adult woman in pigtails and had her play a child instead of casting a child). Then a senator seeking reelection finds the RV and tries to convince Maureen to vote for him. He has small placards in front of him that say he’s both 1000% for and against each issue. I’m not sure if the scene’s trying to make some political statement or be a moment of broad comedy, but it fails at both. To be fair, the scene did make me devolve into giggles repeating, “What the fuck is this movie?” Finally, Maureen sees a clown in the swamp with a bunch of balloons. She laughs at it, receives a balloon, and then is horrified and runs away when it takes off its mask.

Between all these strange sequences are a variety of sex scenes between Carol and Chuck. We do get one flashback of Carol as a 16-year-old (again played by the adult in pigtails). It’s another hook-up scene. While this one’s consensual, it’s still creepy. You have an adult woman pretending to be a child hooking up with someone who looks like he may actually be 16. Pick the part you find most unnerving.

Approaching the end, Maureen finally hooks up with Chuck. She imagines it happening at the altar she came on before. The three figures—the priest, the clown, and the politician—all menace her but are driven away by Chuck’s fuck eyes. Meanwhile, Carol wakes up, starts dancing around the fire, and the guys from the pick-up truck at the start find her. It goes how you’d expect since, don’t you know, sexual assault means it’s a serious movie with themes.

Chuck and Maureen spot a plane flying overhead the next morning and, when trying to wave it down, find Carol’s body. Suddenly we cut back to the beginning of the movie. Maureen opens her eyes as though the entire film was a vision she had when meditating. This time, though, Maureen is happy that Chuck is an Aries and eagerly gets in the RV. The RV drives off as the clown’s balloons fly up from behind it. THE END.

“Interminable” would be one of the words I’d use to describe this movie. Also “ill-conceived.” The people involved clearly watched too much of the new American underground and misunderstood what made those movies good. This tries to have the same subversion of form and narrative that films like Easy Rider have, but not the sense of what is communicated by subverting those forms. So the movie imagines itself as an imagistic spiritual meditation on America while throwing the culture’s hang-ups with religion, property, and sex back in its face. Only it doesn’t. This is a film by the edgelords of hippiedom who imagined that free love and free drugs would destroy the system. Coincidentally, I’m about to reread Brave New World, you know, the dystopian novel about a population kept under the thumb of the ruling class through hedonistic indulgence of sex and drugs? The novel written in 1932?

The movie’s neither clever, nor interesting and the cinematography, while nice, isn’t nice enough to entertain for the seventy-seven minute runtime. Skip it.

283. Nabonga

283. Nabonga (1944)
Director: Sam Newfield
Writer: Fred Myton
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org here

A man searches the jungles of Africa for a crashed plane containing money stolen from a bank.

A man and his daughter crash in Africa. The man kills the pilot when the pilot sees all the jewels and money the man’s carrying. Meanwhile, the daughter has found an injured gorilla.

Cut to many years later (without any indication of it being later) to a small village where several white people are gathering. A stranger has arrived and the other visitors are trying to figure out why he’s there. After he saves local man Tobo, Tobo draws him a map to the “house with wings” and the “white witch.” One of the other visitors finds out the stranger is looking for a crooked banker who went missing in the jungle with stolen goods. The visitor and his partner decide to follow the stranger and Tobo.

The connection between the stranger and the man from the beginning, as he tells Tobo, is that the man had been the stranger’s father’s banking partner. When the man ran off with the bank’s money, the stranger’s dad was blamed for it. The suspicion, guilt, and shame eventually led to the father committing suicide. The stranger wants to get the money back to the people it was stolen from to clear his dad’s name and set things right. Even though it’s gotta be at least a decade later. Plus getting to Africa and embarking on this search can’t have been cheap. I mean, sometimes you gotta take the L.

Anyway, nothing much happens. For a film that’s only a hair over 71 minutes, there’s a lot of padding. Tobo and the stranger go through the jungle, don’t face much peril, and Tobo gets killed by the gorilla the girl befriended years before.

The “white witch,” no surprise, is the girl all grown up. She’s called a “witch” because she can command the jungle creatures. The stranger tells her he wants to take her jewels, she says no, he says she doesn’t know right from wrong. The other visitor and his partner track the stranger down, trap the gorilla, and steal the money. Gorilla escapes, kills the villains, and stranger tells the girl she’ll like it in America. THE END

Quick note: the villain is going to kidnap the girl, take her back to America, and keep the money for himself. The hero, the stranger, also unilaterally decides to take her back to America and take all her money. I’ve seen a lot of movies where the good guys are the good guys because the movie says they’re the good guys, but you wouldn’t know it from their actions, but I’ve rarely seen movies where, in the final moment, the hero announces his plans to do exactly what the villain was going to do, except be handsome while doing it.

I don’t have much commentary to offer because there’s really nothing to the film. Nothing much happens, then they walk through the jungle without too much going on, and then the hero gets beat up and watches the gorilla murder the villain. I’d say it’s Walking: The Motion Picture, but that would imply more action. There’s not even anything to get mad about in this movie. It’s a null property.
However, it is at least in the public domain and you can grab a copy from archive.org here, but that print’s kind of dark (though slightly better than my copy) and it’s just not a visually interesting movie. Sure, it has a guy in a gorilla suit which always lands in the positive collumn of a film, but it’s otherwise flat and listless. There’s not much you can make fun of and I don’t think it’d be useful for editing or recontextualizing projects.

And, no, they never explain why it’s called Nabonga. I guess, from the title, it means gorilla? Maybe? But it’s never said in the movie. So, yeah. Skip it.

282. Tomboy

282. Tomboy (1985)
Director: Herb Freed
Writer: Bud Zelig
From: Cult Cinema

Tommy is a female mechanic who has to prove that her experimental stock car can beat the car of the professional team that patronizes her.

Another Marimark Production. Entitled Tomboy. Boy, do I have high hopes for this one.

I’m less than 10 minutes in and there’s a hint of Poochie here: she’s awesome at everything she does, including pick-up games of basketball and car repair. Also, everyone seems to like her and she seems happy with her life. None of this is a problem on its own, but it suggests the plot is going to revolve around her not properly conforming to expected gender norms and the happy ending will come when she gets all femmed up making her a fitting reward for whatever guy comes along liking her for who she is as the titular Tomboy.

I mean, I’m guessing.

The more interesting move, and the one I’d prefer, would be the outside forces insisting upon gender norms interfering with her life and the community ultimately rallying around her. Sort of like what happens in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I’ve been wanting to rewatch. There’s a nice kindness at the core of that movie despite its moments of 80’s “boys will be boys” hand-waving). In essence, I want the kind of plot we always get in nerd-focused movies: characters are happy with themselves, get bullied over what makes them unique, and then get validated for not changing while the bullies get rejected. Simple plot, but fun. Only when the protagonist is a woman, she’s not allowed to be fully vindicated. She has to change to become appropriately feminine.

Think of all those “ugly duckling” type movies. Guy asks the Plain Jane to the prom as a dare or a prank, but when she puts effort into her appearance, *gasp,* why this woman who’s been conventionally attractive but with glasses and slightly disheveled clothes has in fact been conventionally attractive all the time! How wrong we were to ever doubt that she was different from us and thus less deserving of dignity.

An implicit argument of those movies, and one of the reasons they’re not very satisfying, is that the conclusion, the revelation of the woman as beautiful by everyone’s standards, validates the villains’ position. Were the woman still ugly by their standards after the make-over, would the villains still be denounced for having treated the woman poorly? The villains’ mistake isn’t treating this person poorly because they’re different, it’s mistakenly seeing the person as being different and thus treating one of their own poorly.

Another reason the trope is boring and not what I want to see is that it’s an easily recognizable trope. I’ve seen this movie, even when I haven’t, and I want to see the other movie. Where’s the flick where the jock asks the nerd to prom and then skips prom to instead hang out with the nerd and their friends doing what they want to do? In other words, a flick that argues that their differences, their particularities, are precisely what makes them interesting and someone the jock (and jock as audience surrogate) would want to be partners with.

All of this before I’m ten minutes in, so I’ll watch and tell you how right/wrong I was.

ONE MOVIE LATER:

So, that’s a thing.

Like a lot of these Marimark productions, the movie approaches having a plot and then just doesn’t. Tommy is the titular tomboy. Her father was a decorated astronaut although that doesn’t come up at all. In fact, just about everything in the movie doesn’t really come to anything. She’s a mechanic. One of her customers is an asshole rich playboy who owns a race car company. She has a crush on his driver who has a name but who I’ll just refer to as “racecar.” Cause he sucks.

So after a lot of racecar being charmless and unlikable, they start dating and we arrive at the real plot of the movie… with thirty minutes left. Rich asshole is trying to get someone to invest in his company. Shows off his latest car, except Tommy’s driving. Investor is impressed by Tommy and learns that she’s not a professional driver but, in fact, is building her own experimental racer. Racecar patronizes her in front of the investor and she says her car could beat his. Investor wants to see the race so it happens.

One car-building montage later, it’s race day. Racecar is worried about the condition of the track and that Tommy might get hurt. The movie, even this late in the game, can’t decide if he’s the lover or the louse. They race, she wins, investor convinces asshole rich to buy her car. They’ll race it in Daytona with racecar driving (even though he just got beaten in a one-on-one by a completely untrained amateur). Will she go to Daytona with racecar? “Maybe” THE END

I mentioned a certain giddiness when watching Weekend Pass, and it was sort of the sense of preparing to flinch in anticipation of something that hasn’t arrived but you know is coming. The movie is predictable and you’re just waiting for the inevitable moment to arrive. That’s true of most these Marimark films. That’s what I mean when I call them “perfunctory.” They’re relentlessly predictable.

This was not predictable.

I mean, a lot of the beats are there: she’s dismissed because she’s a woman and then proves herself, catches the love interest’s attention through her competence then wins him over by femming up, beats the bullies by joining forces with her old friends and family. However, none of that gets into the weird gender stuff in the movie.

No, I mean weird. If you’re rolling your eyes and thinking “SJW,” fuck you. Also, even you would find it weird.

For instance, when she goes to the party, rich asshole is acting like a procurer and passing women off to the various men there. The scene honestly feels like he’s hired a bunch of sex workers to staff an orgy. Asshole takes Tommy to meet racecar while Tommy’s friend hangs out in the front room to “entertain” the guests. Tommy navigating the house is intercut with the friend stripping for everyone as well as a sequence of a woman alone in a hallway with a man taking off all his clothes. She keeps telling him if he doesn’t stop, she’s going to leave. When he’s finally naked, she laughs and hugs him.

These three scenes are happening at the same time, do not make sense, and are not referenced again.

When Tommy finds racecar, he’s in a room with a bunch of people watching a porno. When she leaves because she’s disgusted by it, he chases her down and chastises her. He’s caught in the embarrassing situation, but talks down to her because of her reaction. Then he says, “Tommy, I like you,” as if that’s an argument for anything. He likes her so she should… what? Date him despite who he is and how he treats her? They start boxing, she lands some good hits on him, and then he punches her in the face knocking her to the ground. Then they start hooking up and they’re dating.

All this is one sequence. Everything I’ve described happens in the party scene. At this point, I was just going “what?” I had the sense that I knew where the plot was going, but it made every wrong move to get there.

I mentioned before that these movies usually introduce the character who’s interested in the hero at the start and wins them over at the end. Tomboy halfway has that in the form of Harold. He shows up at the beginning as a customer of Tommy’s. He asks Tommy’s friend out, gets turned down. Then he immediately turns to Tommy and asks her out only to be turned down. He says, “But I gotta date somebody and soon!”

He disappears for the next hour of movie only to return when Tommy is in a bar feeling bad about racecar. He asks her to go home with him and she says yes. They go to her place where Tommy’s friend pops up and they send Harold home. “But I just got here.” He starts hitchhiking and immediately gets picked up by a woman who flashes her breasts at him. Lightning flashes behind him as he gets in the car and it speeds away.

Look, I watched the thing and I don’t understand what happened. All I can say is the Nice Guy™ is strong with this one.

The movie sucks. It’s confoundingly bad and the only reason I’m not lumping it in with the truly terrible ones I’ve watched like Cavegirl or Going Steady is that it’s not constantly invoking and championing sexual assault. It is a goddamn weird flick, though, and I do not recommend watching it.

281. Weekend Pass

281. Weekend Pass (1984)
Director: Lawrence Bassoff
Writer: Lawrence Bassoff
From: Cult Cinema

Four sailors go to LA for a weekend after completing basic training.

It’s Marimark so everything is as expected and perfunctory.

Four sailors—a womanizer, a comic, a black guy, and a nerd (yes, they have names, but that’s as much as they’re defined in the movie and, yes, the black guy’s blackness is the entirety of his character)—leave on the titular weekend pass to go to LA before being deployed. Each has their own goals in the city—the womanizer is meeting his girlfriend, the nerd has a blind date, the comic is going to premiere at a comedy club, and the black guy is… also there. He has less of an itinerary than the other three, but is from LA and runs into his old gang while taking the other three out for soul food and… Yeah. Do you see where I’m going?

The movie is a Marimark comedy so that means it’s not funny and nothing happens for ninety minutes. Rather than try to describe a plot, here are what goes down with each character.

Let’s start with the comedian because he sucks. He’s not funny, and not just because men aren’t funny. This is confusing because we’re talking about a Marimark comedy, which itself isn’t funny. So is he not funny because that’s the joke, or is he not funny because the whole movie’s not funny?

He does his set at the club. The late Phil Hartman makes a cameo as the MC, which gave me a mournful shock. I thought, You’re so much better than this, Mr. Hartman. Then he does an anti-Arab joke and, well, some material you elevate with your presence and some you let drag you down. Anyway, the comedian meets a female comedian, and they hit it off. She bombs, then he bombs, but they’re a couple now so whatever.

The womanizer meets up with his girlfriend who’s become very “LA” and “industry.” They go to a chichi restaurant where she ignores him. Then they go back to her place where she pulls out a vibrator that intimidates him and her general sexual aggressiveness makes him run away. In the end, he meets up with the cousin of the nerd’s blind date and they hit it off.

The nerd’s blind date is also a nerd so I guess that’s his whole arc.

Meanwhile the black guy is the closest this film gets to a character. He’s pursuing a fitness instructor throughout the movie. When the group arrives in LA, he sees her giving a demonstration on the beach. He participates, then goes to her class, then calls her for a date, and she rebuffs him each time until the phone call. She invites him and the other three to a party her gym is throwing and that’s where everyone ultimately hooks up with their partners.

The weekend ends, the sailors say goodbye to their lady friends and then goodbye to each other since they’re all shipping off in different directions. THE END

I laughed at this more than I do at most good comedies because it’s just so bad. I was filled with a strange giddiness while watching the movie because I was just cringing the whole time. This is ninety minutes of being embarrassed for someone else.

And that’s a quality unique to Marimark films, that constant question, “How are you screwing this up so badly?” The movie’s competently shot, no technical flubs, and the actors are fine. They aren’t being asked to do anything major, but they rise to the material given to them. It’s just that there’s nothing here.

Which is a shame because it felt like there could have been something a little sharper. The characters face challenges, have moments of self-reflection, and seemingly change because of them, but nothing feels like it has weight and they’re not real characters so I can’t care. I mean, the nerd and his date look at themselves in a mirror and she asks, “Why do they call us ‘nerds’?” like they’ve been enduring this oppression, this bullying, this pain of being nerds throughout the movie. Only it’s the first and only time it comes up.

The end of the movie is as inevitable as the end of the weekend, but that should operate as a ticking clock, as something adding pressure to this final weekend they all have. Instead, sure as Monday follows Sunday, the movie just ticks along to the end of its ninety minutes.

So it’s not a recommend. I mean, I haven’t even gotten into the casual racism that pops up throughout, and, yeah, I know I’m saying that despite referring to the black character in the movie as “the black guy.” The writer/director of this also did Hunk, a Marimark film I liked, but was just a bit quicker and more willfully silly. Ultimately, Weekend Pass needed to be more camp. Instead it feels like it’s trying to be something sincere, but cannot possibly achieve that goal. Skip it.

280. The Four Shaolin Challengers

280. The Four Shaolin Challengers aka Huang fei hong si da di zi (1977)
Director: Hai-Feng Wei
Writer: Hai-Feng Wei
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A merchant opens a kung-fu school in his town, angering the local gangsters.

It’s been a little bit since one of the martial arts movies popped up in my queue and, I have to admit, they’re not my favorites. I think I’ve mentioned this in other reviews, but I don’t know the genre well enough to say what makes these movies good or bad. Generally the ones in these sets follow the same format: gangsters push their criminality a little too far, someone finally stands up to them, gangsters bring in outside forces as reinforcements join the hero, several fights ensue leading to a climatic final battle where the hero’s kung fu ultimately defeats the villain’s.

Same thing happens here.

The mob is collecting their protection money from stalls in the market, try to attack a merchant, and another merchant then fights off all the goons. The locals ask the merchant to open a gym and teach them all kung fu. The crime boss finds out, hires some famous hitmen, and the plot goes as you’d expect.

Except things seem a bit out of order. The crime boss says they can pressure the hero because they’ve kidnapped a woman who doesn’t seem connected to him. Only they haven’t kidnapped her yet. That happens in the next scene. Then she’s forced to work in a brothel, escapes, is sexually assaulted, and then rescued by the hero’s brothers who’ve just arrived in town.

The sense of, “Wait, did I miss something?,” pervades the entire movie right up till the very end. One of the big battles ends with one character asking the hero to kill him. The hero tells the man that he’s been working for a notorious criminal. Hearing this, the loser of the fight says he’s not going to fight for that man anymore and leaves. The battle ends with, “Oh, well I’ll be going then.”

I don’t know why the movie feels that way, but it’s what makes the movie so entertaining. The translation, the dubbing, and the odd plot choices make this a lot of fun. If you can get past the sexual assault, and that’s a big ask, this movie offers a lot of entertainment potential just on the level of confused laughter.

So it’s a recommend. I don’t think it’s great, but I did laugh at it enough to wish I was sharing the experience with others. Like many of the martial arts films in these sets, I think this is in the public domain. I’m not 100% sure. However, I’m guessing yes and have uploaded a copy to archive.org here. Watch it with friends and enjoy the shared confusion.