Then you have love’s smarmy, douche-like face which Hank wears like a Congressional Medal of Honor for Service to Desperate Vacationing Broads Who Have No Self Respect during all the gigaloing he does, when he’s not making a play for Pete’s wife, Kit Jordan.

You also can’t avoid love’s drunk face either, since Hank, Pete, and especially Kit spend every moment they aren’t spitting out ridiculous dialogue at each other drinking down glasses of hard liquor.

Love’s most magnificent face though has to be the one that Kit has during what laughingly passes for a climax during the film. This is of course the “I’ve just been gored in the guts by a big ass bull” face!

It all begins innocently enough (and it is innocent because nothing much ever comes of it) when the body of a beach stud who hung around Pete and Hank washes up on the shores of Acapulco. The only clue to his mysterious demise is the bracelet he was wearing inscribed with the phrase “love is thin ice.” The dead guy had been involved with Kit, so Pete is a suspect, but Mexican law enforcement being what it is, the investigation never amounts to much more than the occasional chat between Pete and the barely interested detective, Riccardo.

The dead guy’s ex-girlfriend Carol comes down to Mexico to find out what happened to him, but she spends most of the time mooning over Pete and by the time it comes out that the dead guy apparently sent her a suicide note, the main consequence of his death is that that chintzy bracelet with the cheesy inscription has been used by both Kit and Carol to zing each other in their low wattage squabble over Pete.

The casual viewer can be excused for suffering through the first 90 minutes of the movie wondering just what the hell the point is of watching this group of unlikable characters drinking and bickering amongst one another. Kit is a dour lush who delights in humiliating both herself and Pete whenever she can like when she tells Carol at a party that she and Pete met at the hospital where she was recovering from another of her (no doubt drunken ) car wrecks and he was there selling his blood!

For his part, Pete is even more pathetic because he is completely cognizant of just how pathetic his existence is. He insults Kit about all her money, while living the easy life off it, but somehow at the same time, not really caring about the money at all. Perhaps his dalliance with Carol (who he believes is a good-hearted small town gal) is his attempt to escape and reclaim a bit of his lost humanity. But Carol sort of turns out to be just as willing to sink to Kit’s level in going after Pete, except that she’s no where in Kit’s league in doing so.

Every broken down dude who’s ever sold his blood and by extension his soul in order to hook up with a blonde bombshell with lots of dough knows you don’t get redeemed by walking away from that payday though! Redemption can come only from out-studding the stud who’s trying to take your mealticket, I mean, your soulmate!

So it is that Pete finds himself caught up in not one, but two towering throwdowns involving both man and beast! Following the nonsensical field trip that all these people who hate each take together to a bullfighting farm, Kit gets into the expected bullfighting accident causing Pete to have to unleash all his matador skills to keep his gored gal from getting stampeded! As magnificently masculine it is that he fended off man’s deadliest enemy to save his lady, what follows is even more macho: Pete vs. Hank. In a hospital parking lot!

Two tanned gods slugging and hugging, all for the right to hold Kit’s head out of the toilet during one of her inevitable drunken pukefests!

By the time Hank throws in the towel, it seems so obvious that the only way Pete could regain a bit of self-respect is to fight over an alcoholic chick with a male whore in front of the hospital where said alcoholic chick is recovering from being punctured by a large bovine. It’s in all the reputable self help books.

Lots of quotably bad lines, Hanks lame blackmail attempt of some old broad he’s banging, and Kit’s sordid past that wasn’t even interesting enough to compel the maid who was listening to it to stick around for the end of the story, all only add to a languidly bad film that constantly threatens to boil over into hilarious territory, but never quite makes it due to an appalling lack of anything much happening. Love Has Many Faces leaves the audience with yet one more face – abject apathy tinged with minor humorous disbelief at what is being seen and said throughout.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Arthur is a lawyer who is partners in a firm with his best friend Julius and his father-in-law, Noah. Arthur is a pillar of the community, a guy who believes in the black letter law of what is right and wrong, even to the point that he would rather get his crazy client acquitted for murder than have her convicted so that she could get mental health treatment!

The incident doesn’t play any real part in the film, but merely serves to illustrate the gulf that exists between Arthur and his typically clean cut yet brooding early 1960s son. Arthur insists on doing his job as a defense attorney, but his son Warren, who has every reason to hate his miserable existence, what with his wealthy upbringing and the torturous life he leads at Harvard, believes his father should do what’s best for the woman. Because like all moneyed college punks, he knows everything about life already by banging all the sluts at Smith College!

Arthur loves Warren, but somehow can’t get through to him. If only some terrible crisis could befall them that would bring them close together! Thank god then for the town tramp Veronica!

It is only after Veronica (who has an obnoxious propensity to refer to herself in the third person) cries rape against Warren following a night of what the film calls “carnal knowledge” that Arthur really starts to connect with his son. Because he’s going to defend Warren!

But it’s not just the fact that his child is now a client that Arthur suddenly realizes that life isn’t just the law and that sometimes there really isn’t either a right or wrong. It’s that one night stand he had with his best friend’s wife Marjorie (Lana Turner from Peyton Place) that really enables him to grow as a person and realize that he loves his wife and his kid! (That this happened on the very same night that Warren and Veronica were exchanging carnal knowledge only serves to demonstrate how expertly structured the film is for maximum impact and more importantly, maximum laughs.)

And before all you women’s libbers with short haircuts and who wear earth tone colored slacks get up in arms about what a misogynistic goon Arthur is for using poor old Marjorie’s cooch as a bizarre form of therapy, Marjorie herself gets a dose of self improvement as well, finally getting the courage up to walk out on her crippled up husband Julius!

And before any of high and mighty types condemn both Marjorie and Arthur for humping all over the trust that Julius placed in them, it is only when Marjorie says she is leaving that Julius finally breaks down and says that he still loves her, despite pushing her away all the years since the accident that somehow left him walking with a limp and ever more heinous, a limp crotch! And their marriage is instantly saved! Really, he ought to be sending those two a “Thanks for Cuckolding Me” card!

You know who else benefited when Arthur was helping his handicap friend by banging the crap out of his wife while he was off in Washington on a tax case? His old father-in-law who runs the law firm!

Lately, there’s some issues of missing assets in the trusts that old Noah has been managing. Arthur suspects that the old man has finally lost it and is an incompetent old dolt who needs to be put out to pasture. What a relief it is then that Noah is just embezzling all the money to pay off a bad business deal from 30 years ago! And with Arthur’s newly discovered humanity, instead of turning him in like he would of before going down on Marjorie, he’s willing to look the other way! Is it too much too soon to nominate this guy for a Nobel Peace Prize?

Don’t get me wrong though, Arthur isn’t an infallible saint. Warren’s girlfriend Helen (she was raised by Noah) comes to the law firm and wistfully looks through her safety deposit box and tells Arthur she’s leaving. He asks where’s she’s going and she says she’s not going to anywhere, but away from somewhere, the word “suicide” flashing in neon above her creepily vacant smile as she mentions that Warren told her he didn’t love her.

One bottle of cleaning fluid later and Arthur beats himself up for five seconds before dealing with the fact that Warren has gone and jumped bail on his rape charge! Thanks goodness he has all that compassion and inner strength from sexing up that hot blonde the night before to draw on!

With Efram Zimbalist, Jr., Jason Robards, Turner, and George Hamilton, everyone in the film spews forth with appropriate conviction the often times ridiculous dialogue (“your generation doesn’t have a monopoly on sex, legal or illegal – you just talk about it more” Arthur snidely tells Warren during one heated exchange) and the cheating, rape allegation, suicide, and embezzlement are suitably lurid (and frequently punctuated loudly and without subtly by Elmer Bernstein’s very soapy score) to keep things interesting despite the fact that everything seems to get better only after Arthur and Marjorie commit adultery. Perhaps realizing how silly it all turns out to be, the film itself merely gives up in the end without actually resolving any of the outstanding issues or anyone getting their comeuppance for their misdeeds.

A moronically entertaining ode to a fleeting, bygone era where a one night stand was somehow both filthy and a path to self-actualization that helped everyone who felt its dirty, secretive caress.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Truly, there can be no greater anguish for a father than what his poor precious daughter (whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years due to his boozing ways) is going through. Oh, not the anguish of everything just mentioned. Blackmailers can be bought off, secrets can be self-righteously uncovered at dramatic moments, and the juvenile court of the old days wouldn’t let some murderous teen be tried as an adult. No, the real, soul crushing anguish Luke experiences is when he is told that his daughter’s medical exam revealed she wasn’t a virgin anymore!

Please God let it be due to all that horseback riding she’s been doing while living with mom in San Francisco! But all of Luke’s hopes and dreams for having a non-slut daughter are crushed once he gets his hands on a letter she wrote to her mom’s boyfriend, Lazich. Oh, sweet, sweet hymen! We hardly knew you!

While Luke mourns the devastating loss of the skin the blocks the opening of his daughter’s vagina, it is important to note that these sorts of things don’t happen in a vacuum. There’s all sorts of hand-wringing backstory to be unspooled, complete with overbearing rich mother-in-law, tramp wife, aforementioned alcoholism, and most deliciously of all, Star Trek‘s DeForest Kelley as an amoral art critic prone to dirty talk and trying to get into Luke’s wife’s very busy panties.

Where Love Has Gone flashes back 20 years or so to World War II, where all the stars look exactly the same as they did 20 years in the future. Luke is a regular Captain America, having won the Congressional Medal of Honor, while Valerie Hayden (Susan Haywood) is a rich girl who is a gifted sculptor. They meet at one of her shows and her mother, Gerald, immediately sets about trying to match the two up.

Valerie isn’t interested in Luke until she hears him telling off her mother. A quickie marriage ensues and a hilarious montage follows where World War II is rapidly finished up by about four newspaper headlines interspersed with Valerie’s hard at work on her hideous sculptures as if to show that while Luke is risking his life for freedom, Valerie is keeping the American home front strong for pampered rich girls by carving ugly doodads for other wealthy morons.

Once back in civilian life, Luke sets about having his hopes and dreams obliterated by his pushy, scheming mother-in-law. Spurning her offer of a job at her business, Luke strikes out on his own with his dream of building homes to take advantage of the post-war demand for housing. Ultimately Gerald succeeds in emasculating the war hero by secretly sabotaging his efforts and forcing him to slink back to her and accept her job offer.

This begins the slow and fitfully funny downward spiral of Luke and his marriage to Valerie. He drowns his sorrows in booze, Valerie responds by becoming a slut, and it all explodes in domestic fights that are funny where the film probably meant them to be dramatic and shocking. (“You’re not a woman! You’re a disease!” Luke shouts at Valerie provoking unintended chuckles despite his icky attempt to rape her moments before and her equally icky response!)

Valerie’s mom forces them to get a divorce, Luke moves away, doesn’t get to see his daughter, dries out and becomes a successful architect. He comes back into all their lives once he receives word that his daughter has killed a man.

The remainder of the movie details Luke trying to reach his daughter to find out exactly what happened. The daughter, played as a pouting and vaguely creepy sexpot by Joey Heatherton, refuses to tell anyone anything, but it is clear that she is jealous of her mother and that her childhood with her mother, while well provided for financially, was lacking emotionally.

The movie though doesn’t actually detail any of this because it is obsessed with showcasing the screaming melodramatics of the mother, father and mother-in-law. In fact, other than a brief mention by Luke of the “baby” early in the marriage, the child is never seen or referred to until the divorce hearing that wraps up the flashback.

Presumably inspired by the real life events surrounding movie star Lana Turner and her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, the film, from the writer and the director of the similarly salacious The Carpetbaggers, delights in throwing out its tawdry accusations and morally degenerate characters, but is hampered by its slapdash treatment of the effect such a life has on the child as well as its over-the-top histrionics that fail to resonate with modern audiences raised on afternoon talk shows, reality programming, and more generally, the immoral society we have today.

Whether it’s the garish self portrait the mother-in-law insists on hanging in the house she gave Luke and Valerie, the overbaked dialogue (“when you’re dying from thirst, you’ll drink from a mudhole!” Valerie tells her mom), the dirty letters both mother and daughter wrote their boyfriend, the smarmy art critic with the pipe, or the entirely gratuitous confrontation Luke has with Valerie in the courtroom climax that sets in motion another series of tragic events that couldn’t help but scar his daughter even worse than killing the man she shared with her mother, Where Love Has Gone is exactly the sort of outdated hypertrashy flick where you aren’t surprised that Luke threatens to spank his elderly mother-in-law played by Bette Davis, but only that it doesn’t actually happen!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In an effort to distinguish itself from all the other movies about lost love on the English moors, this one begins in the middle of a driving blizzard instead of a driving thunderstorm.

I like watching people trudging through fake snow and looking at model houses in the background of the indoor set this was filmed on so I was immediately enthralled by it all and waited with baited breath to see whether this was the set up to a very long flashback. You could pretty much see it coming once this traveler showed up at Wuthering Heights and everyone inside was all morose and caked with old-guy and old-gal make-up.

The traveler is grudgingly given a room and it isn’t long before he hears a woman’s voice howling on the wind outside his room (the old bridal suite of course). Once the man of the house learns that this guy heard a chick yakking out in the storm, he hauls ass out of the house and into the blizzard.

The traveler looks at the old hag and asks what the dude’s problem was and who the lady was he heard. She opens her mouth and utters the words that must have struck fear into his heart and made his nads shrivel up into his belly button: “it all began forty years ago!”

The old lady starts in with some drivel about how Heathcliff (the guy who went charging out into the snowstorm) was brought back to Wuthering Heights by Cathy’s dad when he was just a smelly lad running the streets of Liverpool.

Cathy’s father explains to his two dubious children (Cathy also has a no-good brother named Hindley) that in life they must be prepared to share their good fortune with others and that Heathcliff is going to be staying with them.

The two boys don’t like each other and Heathcliff comes after Hindley, but Hindley picks up a good-sized rock and tells him to back off. Heath doesn’t and Hindley bounces the rock off his skull from about three feet away!

Heath is busted open, but swears revenge on Hindley no matter how long it takes. This sets up the lifelong feud between these two that really gets going once Cathy and Hindley’s dad croaks and Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights, demoting Heath from foster kid all the way down to stable boy!

In the meantime, Cathy and Heathcliff enjoy one another’s company pretending to be knights and maidens and stuff like that and even when they get older they are still enamored with one another and hang out on the moors just enjoying life.

Cathy is a woman, so you can imagine that that won’t be enough for her. Oh no. She’s got her eyes on a better life. You get the idea that it will be with Heathcliff if he can get his crap together and develop a taste for material wealth instead of just being happy with the person he’s with, but if it turns out that Heathcliff isn’t that shallow, she’ll find someone else.

The next thing you know, she’s hanging out with Edgar Linton at his estate and complaining to her housekeeper about what a loser Heathcliff is. Heathcliff overhears this and is pretty upset and goes so far as cut his hands up by punching out some windows.

Thus begins Heathcliff’s descent into a journey of self pity and fury that takes him all the way to America where he makes a bunch of money and allows him to come back and buy Wuthering Heights out from under Hindley and to hang around Cathy and Edgar like some type of broken hearted wraith.

The remainder of the movie isn’t very pleasant to sit through, chiefly because both Cathy and Heathcliff are self-centered, self-destructive boobs that ruin the lives of everyone around them in their efforts to abuse one another’s affections.

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff is full of smoldering rage and intensity and Merle Oberon is a suitably insensitive bitch in her role of Cathy. You can’t really fault what they did in this film, but their characters never did much that engendered much empathy.

Cathy comes off the worser of the two, mainly because it’s understand how Heathcliff felt after being dicked around by Cathy. Heathcliff has given himself completely to her and for her to so arbitrarily reverse course and go with someone else merely because he could buy her better dresses and throw lavish parties goes a long way to explain his increasingly single-mindedly psychotic behavior. (He marries her sister-in-law merely to punish Cathy and tells her this to her face!)

The final scene warps us back to the night of the blizzard where the story began and I guess there’s some type of happy ending for Heathcliff and Cathy, but these are two people who just ooze poison and aren’t anyone you would want to be around. You only hope they end up together just to prevent them from screwing with anyone else’s head and heart.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The Hadley family is in the oil business and practically run the small Texas town that shares their name. The patriarch, Jasper Hadley, tries in vain to keep his kids in line while trying to run his oil business, but he’s an old, used up man, barely living with the disappointment of messed up kids.

Jasper has a son played by Robert Stack. His name is Kyle and he has a passel of issues that manifest themselves in highly dramatic ways. For instance, he’s a drinker who sleeps with a gun under his pillow and he hates himself for never being able to please his father.

He also hates his father because he always feels like Jasper liked his best friend Mitch better. And he hates his best friend Mitch because Mitch is more stable and had a regular old loving father. (We know that Mitch’s dad is one of those solid salt of the Earth types because he goes hunting with Mitch and is always asking Mitch if he needs to talk about what’s on his mind.)

In addition to these standard issue issues, while not exactly shooting blanks, Kyle’s gun that he’s hiding in his pants isn’t exactly fully loaded with buckshot either. You can imagine what that does to a fellow who already feels like a worthless piece of crap. But I’m sure the booze will make him feel better and think rationally about the problem. And the gun fetish should take his mind off things as well.

Jasper’s other kid, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), is acting out in her own way and causes him more trouble while he’s alive than Kyle does. (Kyle at least respects his dad enough that he waits to melt down until after Jasper croaks.)

Marylee is a nympho who throws herself at every guy in town and this usually results in Mitch and Kyle getting a phone call from the barkeep to come down and get her before she hooks up with some barfly. But it isn’t really all these losers she wants, but Mitch.

So who is this Mitch and what’s so danged great about him that Jasper wishes he was his son, that Kyle resents him for being an all-American man, and that Marylee lets herself get laid more times than reusable bathroom tile just to get his attention?

He’s Rock Hudson and once you get a gander at the square jaw and perfect hair, you’ll realize that skinny guys with wavy hair like Robert Stack will always be known as “that guy who hosted Unsolved Mysteries and appeared in a Rock Hudson movie.”

Rock plays Mitch Wayne, a geologist for Hadley oil (Rock as a geologist! These movies sure had a certain flair, didn’t they?) who is a decent, smart guy. He grew up with Kyle and Marylee and Jasper wants Mitch to marry Marylee, but Mitch only loves her like a sister.

And wading into this Texas-sized mess is Lauren Bacall as an executive secretary at some magazine. Her name is Lucy and Mitch falls instantly in love with her.

Even though Mitch is a great guy and looks like Rock Hudson, Lucy ends up marrying Kyle. This made little sense since Lucy knew Kyle all of about two days and what she knew of him was that he was a rather insincere, smooth talking operator who liked to throw his money around in an effort to impress women.

Maybe Lucy didn’t need to know anything about Kyle beyond the fact that he liked to spend money on her, but why then was Mitch in love with her? Being a good guy, he surely wouldn’t have taken a shine to her if he knew she was that shallow, would he?

That’s really the problem with a movie like this. You’ve got to set up a love triangle, but if one of the guys is great and one of them is a nutter, how do you make it so that the woman picks the nutter over the good guy and not make her look like a moron?

Luckily for us, the movie isn’t all that interested in fleshing out Lucy’s character, so we don’t have to wonder about her motivations. We can just pretend she was there as a catalyst for all the seething hate and feelings of inferiority of both Kyle and Marylee to come to the surface.

Early on in their marriage, Kyle cleans up his act by not drinking and losing his interest in firearms. Things start to come apart though once Kyle gets the news from the doctor that he’s a little low on his man juice and he does what any self-respecting half-man would do – BENDER!

He also allows himself to be manipulated by the insanely jealous Marylee into believing that Mitch and Lucy are having an affair, a belief only exacerbated when Lucy tells him that even though he’s kind of iffy in the bedroom, she’s white-trash fertile and pregnant anyway! Kyle believes this to be Mitch’s baby and goes insane!

Rock Hudson and director Douglas Sirk previously teamed up on All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession and if you’re familiar with those films, then whether you’ll find this one worth you time is an easy call to make.

You know how it works: Rock Hudson is the hunk you root for to triumph over various plot twists straight out of Days Of Our Lives. Every scene is played up with exaggerated emotion and import (movies like this have no time for subtlety – not when you need to move straightaway to the next crisis) and sometimes the characters suffer for it, seemingly only pieces to be moved through one situation to the next.

On the other hand, these movies are gorgeous to look at (it’s the kind of movie where leaves blow all around inside the beautifully polished mansion and where everybody drives brightly colored sports cars) and stocked with big time actors who don’t have any problems wringing as much as humanly possibly from the overheated script. (Both Stack and Malone were nominated for Oscars in this and Malone actually won.)

If lush, old style soap operas with bona fide movie stars are your bag, this one’s for you. I know I never turn down a chance to see guys with low sperm counts go on a rampage.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Chalk it up to Arch’s poor musical material, his poor choice in movies (his car stealing epic The Choppers was at least silly fun, while this guitar epic is flat and fairly cartoonish), or more likely that Ric Flair-colored hair poofed up into some type of layered and stratified monstrosity that seems to predict the coming of other idiotically-coiffed music wannabes like Flock of Seagulls.

The beginning of the movie starts with about thirty-five minutes of opening credits. It always seems that with these low-budget dung piles that everybody who ever contributed one kernel of corn to the giant ball of crap the movie is, needs to have their name up there before the action starts. It’s especially silly in this case since all the names are either Arch Hall, Jr., Arch Hall, Sr., and Ray Dennis Steckler or their various pseudonyms.

While these credits are rolling (and rolling and rolling) we see Arch Hall, Jr. As Bud Eagle traipsing around L.A. past famous landmarks like the Capital Records building, that Chinese theater, and all those footprints and handprints in the sidewalk. Bud is understandably awe-struck as he attempts to match his hands with the prints left by television legend Greg Evigan or somebody.

He ends up at this greasy spoon where a kindly (we know she’s kindly because she’s so dang homely!) woman gives him a break on his bill, not charging him the extra penny on the coffee and donut Bud ordered.

Along with the old lady running the hash joint, an aspiring actress or go-go dancer or whatever she was supposed to be named Vickie is hanging out. She’s the innocent who falls for the guy trying to make it big and at some point the music business will come between them and break them apart.

Vickie starts talking to Bud and tells him that his little letter of introduction from the radio station in his hick town isn’t going to cut the mustard with the big guys at A&R so she tells him to come along with her to this talent show. (Her talent is something where she stands around dancing like someone dumped centipedes in her panties.)

Bud gets his big break when the guy who was supposed to go on and play his saxophone chickens out. Bud runs out there, trips gets back up, croaks out his white bread brand of rock and bore and the crowd goes absolutely nuts. Bud Eagle is a hit!

Mike McCauley (Arch Sr.) over at Fairway records sees him and knows that he has to sign him to a crooked deal immediately.

Mike tries to lay the law down on Bud, telling him that he can’t be seeing Vickie anymore because he needs to concentrate on his music. He sets Bud up in a sweet apartment, gets him a new guitar and hires local kids to manage Bud’s new fan clubs.

Bud is of course disgusted by this idea. He’s one of those “old school” types that wants people to like him because they really like him, not because Mike McCauley greased their palms with some bread.

Mike brainstorms with the kids he’s hired as to what sort of fad they should start. Luckily the idea for some kind of dance was nixed.

What was settled upon though was much, much worse. An eagle’s feather! Everyone will wear these lice-infested bird feathers in their hair to symbolize their slavish devotion to their prefab idol, Bud Eagle!

Bud wants out of things, but Mike lays a guilt trip on him about all the money he has invested in making him a big star. He says it’s something like $50,000 and even though Bud only has a few new suits, new guitar, and some disillusionment to show for all his work singing and recording, he agrees to stay on for six months and work diligently to pay off Mike’s investment

Mike’s henchman Steak meanwhile has told Vickie some lie about how Bud didn’t want anything to do with her and also has been intercepting all the letters to and from Bud’s brother from back home and writing his own letters instead.

And then there is disgruntled recording has-been Don Proctor. He shows up at Bud’s place drunk and smartens him up on the way the business works.

Just when it seems all is lost for Bud (he gets conned into working for Mike forever and Vickie sees him with another woman) a miracle occurs. Bud gets kidnapped!

Three dopey crooks that hang out at the greasy spoon where Bud met Vickie, kidnap Bud. Bud gets the gun away from them and decides that it would be okay to be kidnapped and to make Mike pay through the nose to get him back. This is an abysmal sidetrack to an otherwise routinely stupid film.

Unlike its companion film on the Something Weird DVD, The Choppers, Wild Guitar isn’t all that much fun to sit through. Bud is so stereotypically naive and hick-ish that you really don’t have a lot of empathy for him and find it equally hard to believe that he and his brother could outsmart a rash, let alone a mean old record promoter.

The story itself is simplistic of its portrayals of everyone, but not in an entertaining way like in The Choppers. Teaming the dull-witted Vickie with the dull-acting Arch Hall, Jr. doesn’t exactly set your TV on fire and you cringe whenever they try to have a moment of tenderness together. The only thing I could say that might make it worth your while to sit through is to check out Bud’s hairdo. It’s like an entirely new life form!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

For those of you who aren’t up on your mid-seventies Indian movement/hippie movies, Tom Laughlin plays a guy who’s half Indian and half something else named Billy Jack. Billy is a Vietnam vet who also is an expert in hap-ki-do. He has a woman named Jean who is a pacifist who runs the Freedom School out in New Mexico and spends most of the semester getting harassed by bigoted locals.

The film uses a pretty clumsy framing device by having a hospitalized Jean relate to some reporter everything that happened to lead up to the tragic shooting at the Freedom School. This allows the film to present a series of barely connected events with Jean’s narration tying these disparate happenings together. She even tells us a little about Billy’s trial!

The trial of Billy Jack ends anticlimactically and I felt a bit prematurely with a guilty verdict on involuntary manslaughter and a sentence of five to fifteen years in the pen. I was slightly worried at this point since I was under the impression that this movie was about a trial and as far as I could tell, it was all done and the star had lost and been locked away. What would the rest of the movie be about? Heck, what wouldn’t it be about!

See, the rest of the movie is a stunning kaleidoscope of unfocused ranting and raving about every social ill that was popular back in the seventies. The movie abandons any semblance of a story and Jane just starts telling us every little thing that those do-gooders at the Freedom School did.

There’s really no rhyme or reason to why and when any of this goes on. It’s almost as if director/star Laughlin and co-star Taylor trotted out every lame idea they’ve ever had to spread their brand of peace (Billy beats up people, Jean criticizes him for it) and put it into this movie.

Billy Jack disappears for long stretches of the movie and in the meantime we get the run down on the trouble those Freedom School kids have been causing. They tackle issues such as child abuse and Indian land rights and hold all sorts of festivals, including the infamous world’s largest band and drill team contest event called “1984 Is Closer Than You Think.” That must have looked snazzy on the concert t-shirts.

However blinded Tom and Delores are by their far left agenda, they know that the drive-in crowd came to see Billy Jack and not some idiotically-named marching band Olympics, so Billy gets released after doing 4 years of his 5-15 year sentence.

I assume this means that Billy is on parole which in my state would prohibit him from doing stuff like holding the lieutenant governor at gun point, smoking peace pipes, kicking people in the head, throat, knees, gut, and nuts, and they’d probably would want to him to get a steadier job than just “spiritual protector of the Indians and their lands.”

Luckily for us, Billy Jack isn’t the type of half-breed Vietnam vet to let the white man change his ways (we actually learn from Billy that we can only change from the inside!) and he does all this and lots more when he finally gets sprung.

The greatest moment in the movie (aside from Billy Jack slapping Jesus Christ) came when this little girl who we saw in the previous film singing at dinner time, has taken the four years Billy’s been in prison to get her next single in the can and ready to debut it at Billy’s coming home dinner.

A truly treacly piece of syrup that will have you asking for another two stacks of flapjacks just to soak it all up, the lyrics tell of Billy’s absence and the effect it has had on her. Here’s some sample lyrics: “Shed a tear, running dear. Don’t turn back Billy Jack. I am crying. Are you dying just for me?” It’s got a good beat and you can gag to it. I’d give it two boots upside your stupid head, hippie chick.

The film meanders here and there, lurching from issue to issue so that you’re never quite sure if there is actually anything important happening story-wise, aren’t sure who the bad guys are (The guys who want to take away the abused child the Freedom School is helping? The guys stealing the Indian lands? The doctors who won’t treat an Indian? Tom and Delores for being this damn self-important?) and wondering where Billy Jack is all the time these kids are exposing the corrupt practices of the bigot who runs the furniture rental store in town.

As for Billy, he spends an eternity going on a spiritual journey to find himself. This involves a series of increasingly ridiculous scenes that has him painted up all red and wearing some kind of sash like he just took first place in an Oompa-Loompa beauty pageant, all the while meeting a blue-painted version of himself in a cave. It all has to do with spirit guides and finding your center and all that self-improvement speak that makes you wonder if Tony Robbins was an advisor on the project.

Shortly thereafter and for the rest of the film, Billy would open up his strange brand of peaceful whup-ass on various people for various transgressions, while Jean would be there to berate him for doing so.

At the end of the movie, the government moves in and shoots up the joint and the movie demonstrates its subtly in getting its point across by having a soldier shoot a little one armed kid in the back, who was holding the cutest little rabbit I ever seen!

This is worse than your usual bad movie because its 170 minute running time has the power of two terrible films all rolled into one titanic destructive force. It’s really hard to watch them sap all the life out of Billy Jack, while Jean has merely degenerated into a shrill whiner, forever complaining about everything and doing nothing. (At least Billy breaks the occasional knee cap.)

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Here you had Crawford portraying a Broadway star that acts like a complete jackass, is obviously insecure about herself and has this weird relationship with her mother that at times seemed very destructive and at other times seemed to help her a great deal.

You also had the distinct pleasure of Joan overacting in each and every scene, her giant eyes and big snarling lips competing with her day-glo hair to see which would be more annoying to the viewer. She also liked to show her forty-something year old legs off at every opportunity. Thanks granny.

The movie itself makes you wonder what MGM was thinking when they brought back her from her exile at Warner Brothers to do this movie. It is as unpleasant and gaudy as the make up Joan wore in this film.

I know that she’s supposed to be set up as this self-centered jerk and that she supposedly learns to be a better person from a blind guy, but her conversion to loving person was so fast and unexplained it just rang as false as the wigs Joan periodically donned.

The film begins as Joan is rehearsing for another big show that her character, Jenny Stewart, is going to be starring in. Jenny is a Broadway star who still packs ‘em in on that Great White Way, but she’s a holy terror to everyone she works with. She constantly yells and screams and criticizes everyone around her and refuses to accept any criticism of her own work.

She also finds a way to harass the pianist that’s arranging the songs, constantly reworking them and having the guy learn all the new stuff she wants to put in each and every (awful) number.

Eventually this guy gets fed up and quits on her. He’s replaced by a blind guy named Tye and he has the patience of a saint. He’s also able to remember everything that Jenny demands in the way of changes and is able to incorporate that into his playing. He’s even such a genius that he can make suggestions to her to improve the song and dance numbers that are perfect!

Jenny wants Tye fired because she doesn’t want someone telling her how a number should be done. After getting him fired, she mopes around a lot because she’s in love!

It’s really quite ridiculous to see her stomping around demanding that Tye come back and to have her coming over to his apartment and announce to him that he’s been re-hired only because she bet somebody that she could get him to come back.

Jenny tells her money-grubbing mother she’s got man trouble so ma hauls out the scrap book and locates a review that uses a phrase (gypsy-madonna) that Tye had just used in a conversation with Jenny earlier.

What’s this? The review was written by a guy named Tye? And it was written before he was blinded in the war when he could see the lovely and talented Jenny? And it says that Jenny is mega awesome?

Hey, I guess Tye is okay after all because it turns out that he has basically been stalking her the whole movie. He even paid off the old pianist to go to Cuba so that he could be with Jenny!

The major problem with Torch Song is that Crawford is so unbelievable and over the top in her portrayal of this woman that you just sit back and wonder what this Tye character could have ever thought was decent and worth loving in her.

Nothing really rings true about Jenny Stewart and it all resembles so much grandstanding by Crawford. Look at me scream! Look at me scowl! Look at me put down blind people!

If you’re watching this hoping for musical numbers you’re screwed as well. There aren’t hardly any full blown numbers and the one or two there are just make your bowels lurch. None of them stick with you, but I do remember Joan in blackface and singing something about being a two-faced woman.

I also object to the noble blind guy character just on principle. I really can’t stand it when the movies tell us a character has finally been redeemed and is a good person because they learned to love a “freak.”

That’s how this movie treats this character. I mean there’s no other reason why he’s blind except to contrast his goodness (because he’s able to go through life bearing that cross) with her suckiness.

If they wanted to have a character who happened to be blind, fine. Then don’t play it up every chance you get. Or if you want to show me that blind people act just like everyone else, that’s good too, but I don’t need to see these all-wise, saintly handicapped types running around everywhere so that our “star” can be rehabbed by them.

One final point is that the movie is in color and in 1953 that meant showing off by having everything you can imagine in gaudy colors, from Joan’s lemon yellow robe, to green walls, to these weird blue suits the guys wore. It actually fit right in with the entire artificial and tacky flavor of the proceedings.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Welles plays John, a young dude who decides to go off and fight in World War I. Claudette Colbert is his wife, Liz, who waits for him to come home and once the armistice is announced in November of 1918 she gets all giddy with excitement that John will be home by Christmas, but she gets a telegram saying that John had been killed in action.

After she gets back to work from lunch (people sure were dedicated to their jobs back then!) she promptly faints. It turns out that not only is she overcome by grief from the loss of her true love, she is also preggers!

Her boss at the chemical plant, (George Brent from The Old Maid and The Great Lie) has always had eyes for her and takes the opportunity to take her in and nurse her back to health. (Well, it really was his old maid aunt that did it, but he asked her to.)

Even though she will always love John, her boss Larry gets her to marry him and raises John’s son as his own, never telling young Drew that his real daddy was killed in the Great War.

And it’s a good thing that they don’t tell him that because they’d all be lying dogs if they did! See, what the surface-happy Larry family doesn’t know is that John was just wounded really bad. His face was shattered, but more importantly than that, his spirit was shattered. He knows that if he came back all gimpy and ugly that his lovely wife’s life would be ruined forever, so he lets everyone thinks he’s dead while some Austrian doctor fixes him up with a new face.

Even though John has made this sacrifice for her own good (at least in his mind), war again is rearing its ugly head in Europe and if anyone knows that war sucks ass, it would be John, so he hightails it out of Austria back to the good ole U.S. of A.

Somehow when he makes his triumphant return, he has now become Dr. Kessler, Austrian chemist, with cheesy looking beard and hair, limp, accent, and Natalie Wood! Kessler ends up in the same city as he and Liz were from and against all the odds in the whole universe also ends up working for Larry!

Next thing you know Larry is inviting Kessler out to his house to meet the family! When Kessler sees that Larry has gone and married his wife, he is a bit surprised to say the least.

Now then, I mentioned that there just so happened to be another world war getting fired up and guess who is now old enough to go and fight in it? Why Drew of course, but Liz has some problems with Drew wanting to go and get killed in a European war, just like her John did.

It isn’t long before Kessler figures out that Drew is really his son. It also isn’t long before Liz starts to suspect that this handicapped Austrian guy hanging out with Natalie Wood is really Orson Welles slumming in an effort to raise money for his real movie projects.

As unbelievable as all of this is, the ending is even better and features Kessler chasing after Drew who is trying to go Canada to join the RAF and bringing him back home and then convincing Liz that she needs to let the boy go and that she needs to forget their past together and stay with her family and then Kessler catches a cold and dies!

But wait! Liz then has to adopt little Natalie Wood for Kessler!

I like to think that at some point, enough crazy crap goes on in this that it crosses over from lots of coincidences into pure destiny. Questionable make-up job aside, Orson is able to get it done in this one, playing the haunted guy changed by unspeakable tragedy while Claudette’s sadness that lingers just below the surface of her placid home life is likewise very credible.

Tomorrow Is Forever has a bit of a film noir feel to it, what with the whole “returning soldier trying to reintegrate himself into his old normal life” angle. This time, it just happens to be from World War I, but like all great noirs, John is handcuffed by fate (though one he had quite a hand in since he decided not to come back which quite frankly smacks of being really selfish) and is never able to regain what he lost and gave up two decades before.

I suppose he redeems himself to some extant since he is able to play father figure to Drew when he needed it most and is able to finally free Liz from his memory by babbling incoherently to her about the past and the future and somehow managed to work in the title of the movie.

Her conversion from being obsessed with John to liking her second-best husband was really fast and not at all convincing, but by this time it seems a bit silly to start complaining that the movie doesn’t really resemble reality, since the whole thing played like some romantic daydream where there’s all this nobility in suffering and denying your heart’s true desire.

It’s a wholly contrived affair designed to push your emotional buttons, but does so with an A-list cast and with great aplomb. When it’s all said and done, you’ll finally realize that love means never having to drop your Austrian accent no matter how much Claudette Colbert cries and pleads for you to admit that you’re really her long lost husband!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Too poor to actually see the circus, Toby (Johnny Shiloh‘s Kevin Corcoran) hangs around outside the tent soaking up the atmosphere when he’s befriended by the guy selling peanuts, candied apples, and lemonade. Harry Tupper is a smooth talker and offers Toby a job being his assistant.

Toby wishes he could go, but he has an old jerk uncle to go home to, so he declines. Harry gives him a free pass to the circus for that evening’s performance and wishes him luck.

When Toby gets home, his uncle lays into him for hanging out with the circus instead of feeding the hogs. He tears up Toby’s free pass and tells him that he’s not his real son!

Just so Toby doesn’t miss his point, the uncle calls Toby as “millstone” around their neck and then sends him to bed without supper. You can practically hear Harry Tupper rubbing his hands together in eager anticipation.

Toby turns up at the circus, prepared to run away to vend peanuts. Life at the circus though isn’t all cotton candy and limber trapeze girls as Tupper soon reveals himself as a slimy dingus who tries to cheat Toby, yells at him, and even steals his mail!

Toby meets a varied cast of characters during his time at the circus. There’s Ben, the over-sized gruff, but lovable chap in charge of the monkeys. He spends most of his time alternately complaining about having to look after a little runaway and protecting Toby from Tupper’s unscrupulous ways.

There’s Sam, the clown who dispenses wisdom about circus life (save your money, never agree to play stinkyfinger with Tupper, etc.).

There’s also two other little kids who do trick-riding on the horses – Jeanette and Ajax. Jeanette likes Toby, while Ajax is a self-centered brat who we all laugh at when does some showing off on a horse and gets his leg broken off, sending him to rehab and forcing Toby to step up and save the show by learning to be a expert trick rider in two weeks.

And then there’s Mr. Stubbs. Mr. Stubbs is the chimp that Toby ends up palling around with though as is the case with most of these boy-chimp relationships, things start off a little rocky.

See, Mr. Stubbs is one of those chimps that runs around in bib overalls, squawking and stealing stuff. He steals food, he steals money, and he even steals Toby’s mail back from Tupper!

Stubbs is worth the price of admission just by himself and somehow he ends up with all the dramatic scenes. There’s the time he eats too much and almost croaks. There’s that time that he escapes from Toby, breaks into the county jail, steals a gun and starts shooting at everyone. This is by far the greatest scene in any Disney movie as young Toby has to come in and talk Mr. Stubbs down from doing anything stupid.

Then there’s the time that Stubbs goes and gets himself shot by a hunter who has somehow mistaken the Osh-Kosh wearing little fella for a bobcat or something. Oh Mr Stubbs! Why? You were just realizing how valuable life was!

As entertaining as the majority of this one was, I found the ending of the movie to be less than genuine, chiefly because of the sudden change that the uncle apparently underwent. Those letters that Tupper was hiding from Toby were from his aunt and uncle and it turns out that they want him to come home, because the uncle is having problems doing all the work by himself. Well, too bad, jackass! You should have thought of that before you went and scarred Toby for life with your heartless blather!

Toby is young though and his heart still hasn’t shriveled all up from a lifetime of rejection so he decides to run away from the circus. Huh? Who ever has run away from a circus?

Tupper brings Toby back to the circus, his aunt and uncle are there and his uncle is real sorry and all reformed and crap. Toby is glad to see them and triumphantly performs in front of the family that up until a week ago thought he was nothing but a burden.

The ending notwithstanding, the ninety-plus minutes of this movie flew by in a blur of circus antics, colorful characters and solid work by performers like Corcoran.

This is classic wish-fulfillment stuff here. I defy anyone to watch Toby ride away on the circus wagon in the middle of the night, all the problems in his life left behind him, and not think how it was when you were a kid when anything seemed possible as long as you were willing to take a chance.

A fun diversion full of the magic of the old-time circus and the exuberant adventure of childhood. What Top Gun did for military recruitment, Toby Tyler does for running away with the circus.

© 2011 MonsterHunter