Reviews

I'm obsessed with bad movies. I've watched a lot of them. Some of them I enjoy, and some I don't. But the movies that I've seen by Bill Rebane are inevitably the ones that just make me mad. The reason is that pretty much every other film maker out there, when making a movie, tries to make some kind of sense, or at least be artistic. I don't get that sense with Bill Rebane movies. I get the sense that his movies are written and filmed completely at random with no thought for what an audience might think about it. It's really odd.

So let me see if I can summarize the plot. We start out with a rhyming narration by Suck- tor Seuss, who explains to us that there are some millionaires who do random games. Then there's a completely pointless, bizarrely exploitative dance sequence. Then there's some talking and a spider shows up. We meet our annoying cast of characters and fail to care about them. There's a hunchback. Then a bunch of stuff happens. Throughout the rest of the film, things happen and it looks like people are dying. Some seem to die by human action, some by traps, and one by a weird monster. One turns out to be a cop and there's something about a madman. Then it turns out everyone's okay and some are working for the millionaire, including the pointless hunchback. Then they're not. And then the millionaires get betrayed and die. But then they don't. And even the omniscient narrator doesn't have a clue about what's going on. A bad sign for the audience.

If that sounds confusing, the movie's worse. For one thing, that description doesn't have the actors the movie does. The Cold also suffers from a weird lack of knowledge about what it wants to be. It just comes off as a random sequence of scenes, most of which go nowhere. I don't know how to compare it to Bill Rebane's other films. All I know is that it's terrible.

Okay. That's a pretty bold statement, so I'm going to try to defend it as completely as I can. I am willing to acknowledge that the film is very nicely presented. The acting is excellent, the sets are good, and of course the color is magnificent. I'm sure it was even more magnificent at the time. But that's not enough to make a good movie, and pretty much everything else about this movie is completely off.

First of all, this whole film is based on the idealization of the south and the demonization of the north, and I find that highly objectionable. I could deal with it if it were a question of showing the perspective of the people living back in that time and their values. That would be a genuinely interesting thing to do, and it's the sort of thing Goodfellas does. But that's not what this is. It's a complete fantasy-denial that anything bad ever happened in the South and that there were any redeeming virtues to the North. I need not delve into the actual historical picture of the South, or the actual ugliness of slavery, or the actual behaviors of the soldiers and carpetbaggers. Look it up if you don't know. Oh, and don't get me started on the racism in this movie. It was practically intolerable.

But even besides that, the plot is wrong. This did not need to be four hours long. Worse yet, after sitting through those four hours, you don't get anything. It feels like Wagner's The Ring. A lot of people are dead, but other than that, everything is precisely where it was at the beginning for our characters. Rhett is wandering, and Scarlett is at Tara. Great. And there were problems along the way too. At no point was there any remotely sympathetic character. This can be handled well, but really wasn't here. A lot of the people kept changing character, like Rhett caring for no one one second and then fighting for the Lost Cause the next, or Scarlett continually swinging between having courage and whining helplessly all the time. And I won't bother to try and summarize the plot. I doubt you can either without naming every event because it meanders around pointlessly. At one point it's a romance, then it's about a lumber yard, then who-knows-what. It comes out to four hours of rambling, Confederate nothing.

Frankly, I think if this had worse actors and was in black and white, no one would have heard of it. There's nothing much going on. Catch Lawrence of Arabia if you want a good old epic film.

All right. So the plot's something like this. There's some guy who goes around in random masks and he kills a bunch of people who dress up as Santa Claus. Scotland Yard tries to find him, but they really suck. The daughter of one of the Santa's he kills tries to find him and succeeds, but her deductions don't make any sense. Then everybody dies except for the serial killer. Merry Christmas. I knew this wasn't going to be pretty when they misspelled the name of the film in the opening credits. It's almost entirely made up of scenes that are so short and so all over the place that you really can't make any connection with what's going on. The movie would be really predictable (there's a sinister innocuous secondary character, like in Scooby Doo), except that it's impossible to keep track of everything that's happening, as it's completely random. None of the characters are particularly likable, and the scenes really could be arranged in any order. Nonetheless, some of the Santa deaths were fun. The castration was impressive, as was the guy who apparently soaks himself in gasoline before coming to work every day. Amusing, in a sort of god-awful way.

I was checking out Youtube, and I happened to come across the beheading scene from the very end. I have to say, that was one of the funniest things that I have ever seen. The head was so much smaller than the boy's real one, the idea of it made no sense, and man, that communist's voice was all over the place. Then I also saw the reeducation scene (I don't taste any candy...), which was equally terrible, yet somehow beautiful. I was hoping the whole movie would be that amazing. It was. It had me laughing the whole time. All of the skits were truly amazing. The way that newscaster was talking about the pres-uh-dent was astounding. Every scene with that communist guy was great. The reverend was just so almost into his material that you couldn't help being amazed, and the constant montage of corpses just lying around. The torture methods were interesting too, and the bit where the guy has to shoot his mother... priceless. It's a pretty impressive film. However, I do have to take the note that this film represents everything that I hate about evangelical Christians. It has their scare tactics, their bizarre paranoia, their intense knowledge of biblical verses combined with no knowledge of the values the bible stands for. The whole thing feels like the guy believes in some giant sci-fi creature, a lot more like Star Trek's Q than like God. If you'll note, although the preacher says the ten commandments are important, that boy in the beheading sequence is pretty much giving his life for a GRAVEN IMAGE. That really irritated me. So this film is pretty funny, but I still hate every facet of its message. Oh, and by the way, although Stalin, Mao, and Fidel were terrible people, the actual economic system of communism doesn't imply a hatred of religion. It implies a spirit of charity and a love of the trampled proletariat. Another thing that annoyed me here.

Just after I saw it, I was perfectly content to just say to myself that this film was just terrible and deserved no further consideration. Then I started considering it, and I made a classic novice mistake for movies of this nature. I tried to make out the plot. And it's really been getting under my skin. The trouble is, I can pretty much make two complete movies out of this. In one of these movies, the main plot is about a man and a woman who own a skydiving company and can't act. Their marriage is beginning to go down the tubes. The husband is beginning to be attracted to another woman by the name of Suzy. Then his old army friend Joe shows up (who likes coffee), and his wife falls in love with him. The rest of the movie is about that soap opera relationship. But there's another movie here that's just as legitimate! In this second movie, the plot revolves around a skydiving accident in which a character panics and fails to deploy his shoot, falling to his death. Then, that person's girlfriend (or somewhat), goes insane and decides to lash out and kill the person who flew him up there by putting acid in his parachute (It doesn't help that he slapped her after she tried to talk to her, wisely pointing out that she was a broad). The rest of the movie is thus about her revenge on him, and then her just desserts for that revenge. Or there could even be a third movie! In this third movie, the entire film is an exhibition for the talents of professional skydivers,as well as the beauty of the sport. The beauty of modern dance is also exhibited, as embodied by a strong woman, a girl with mysterious roller skates, a Scottish guy, an epileptic, and a floating butt. The question about which one of these is the plot is driving me mad. If it's the first, then all of the dramatic action sequences are irrelevant. If it's the second, then everything that comes before the guy dying is irrelevant. If it's the third, then none of the dialogue parts were relevant at all, and the actors were there for no reasons. I can't make up my mind about this. My e-mail address is leonardfranks@gmail.com. Please find it in your heart to help me understand this incredibly terrible movie.

But that doesn't make this good. First, let me see if I can run down the plot. Some really muscular guy gets hit by a car driven by some seriously badass punks. I wish I could be as incredibly badass as those spaghetti throwing punks! The guy dies and the kids drive on, and the really badass punk among them gives a kind of odd Hamlet speech about how killing the guy was like snuffing out a candle (speaking of candles, check out all those candles in the Voodoo woman's house!) So then the guy's mother gets this Voodoo witch to resurrect her son to send him on a killing spree. A young detective under the supervision of Adam West (Yay!) starts to investigate this as all of the teens die. Then one of the teen's fathers gets killed for some reason that isn't really explained, after which the Voodoo woman, Adam West and the detective go off to the cemetery where we get this freaky twist ending that doesn't contribute to the movie, doesn't really make any sense, and doesn't really conclude anything. Add to this all of the bad acting, bad lines, unfortunate pacing, and you end up with a pretty unusual viewing experience. I didn't really hate this, actually. I definitely recognize that it wasn't good, and I certainly wouldn't want to see it again, but there's no cause to blow this one out of proportion by say, putting it on the bottom 100 list. In reality, I would give it a 1, but to protest its position, I'm giving it a five. I can't bring myself to go any higher.

I have seen a lot of bad movies in my life, ranging from "Glen or Glenda", to "Manos, the Hands of Fate", to "Wild Women of Wongo", but I have never encountered a movie that horrible. That is, and until someone makes a movie consisting entirely of scraping chalk on a fingernail, my least favorite movie ever. Why, you ask? Prepare to know. Mainly, it's because the people who made this film have no sense of pacing. For each important scene that actually advances the plot, there are two scenes that are completely random, freakishly annoying, and utterly irrelevant to anything. Many of these scenes focus on character development of characters who then proceed to do nothing with their newfound character traits, but others include boring walking and snowmobiling and random cuts to other people doing other things that relate at best tangentially to our friends back at the cabin. Add to this the acting, the budget, and the general plotting, and you've got yourself a physically painful little piece of cinema. Incidentally, what the deuce was up with the ending? Everyone disappears except for two people who turn into half naked children in a random meadow in soft focus? That's right down there with "Monster a Go-Go". Don't watch this.