Scott’s Movie Comments

Original post date: 7 June 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ Just when you thought that movies have pushed the bounds of good taste as far or farther than they could go, along comes Street Trash, which redefines what really bad taste means. I mean, really! A game of keep-away with a dismembered male member? Argh! Let me be clear here, I am giving one star because I think the people who made this movie would be crushed if they got more. The plot centers on a bunch of low-life street people in New York City who live for their next swig of booze. The main thing going on is that the local liquor store is selling a bunch of really old whiskey (called Viper) that someone found hidden away. But apparently this stuff is so old that it has changed chemically somehow. And it’s not good for you. It affects everybody a little differently, but the main thing it does is dissolve you from the inside. (Although one fat bum drinks it and expands and expands until he explodes in beautiful Technicolor and slow motion...

Original post date: 31 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ This almost was the last movie for Dennis Hopper. It is a very Sixties movie and looks like Hopper was probably doing a lot of substances while making it. Hopper made it right after Easy Rider, but Universal Studios killed it, so no one ever saw it. Now Hopper owns the rights to it, so he made us watch it before his tribute. It is about a Hollywood crew shooting a cowboy movie in Peru (sort of an empanada western) and the effect it has on the locals. They begin imitating the Americans, except when they do it, the cameras and mikes are fake and the violence is real. Lots of cameos by Hopper’s friends, like Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson. Director Hopper did his best to blur the line between reality and film. I can see why it didn’t get a real release, but I’m glad I saw it.

Original post date: 30 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ I will skip past the high-minded artsy-fartsy analysis of this movie and tell you right up front what you really want to know. In this movie, there is an extremely graphic oral sex scene. I’m talking X-rated. Okay, now that that’s out of the way: This movie (by Italian director Marco Bellochlo whose films usually have body parts in the title: Fists in the Pocket and The Eyes, The Mouth ) is about a young woman, who is going crazy, and the male high school student, who comes along for the ride. She is engaged to a man on trial for terrorism. Her teenage lover is mostly just horny which, when you’re a teenager, is called Love. There are some funny moments, some intentionally.

Original post date: 30 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ This movie is an out-and-out comedy. Mikey and Georgy are two airheads who dig up the brain of their long dead Uncle Anwar so they can fulfill his dream of reincarnating the ancient goddess Sheetar (who has a large toothy mouth where her appendix should be). The catch is, they have to build Sheetar a new body out of female body parts (no two of which can be from the same woman). That’s the easy part. The hard part is they have to find a virgin (in L.A.) to feed her for her first meal. Pretty mindless stuff. The second best scene is a send-up of the ubiquitous female in peril situation. A girl has just seen her best friend hacked to bits before her eyes, and she runs for the door. Just as she reaches safety, she stops and says, “Damn, I forgot my purse,” and she runs back inside. If you want to bear about the first best scene, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Original post date: 27 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ This one was a particularly keen disappointment. It comes from the Merchant-Ivory stable, which has turned out a whole string of tasteful, high-class films, like A Room with a View. And the cast looked so good. It stars Mary Stuart Masterson, who was the best thing (many would say the only good thing) in Some Kind of Wonderful. Also featured are James Earl Jones, the classy actor whose heavy breathing was immortalized in three Star Wars movies, and the excellent Geraldine Page (Oscar winner for The Trip to Bountiful ). So, what could go wrong? Answer: the script and the supporting actors. Franny (Masterson) is a 16-year-old rich girl who, in place of parents, has a couple of caricatures of rich people. Mother plays tennis and has a brain the size of a photon. Father is an attorney who gives lip service to liberal ideas but is basically an elitist snob. Franny gets a summer job at The Children’s Center, a facility for female juveniles who ...

Original post date: 24 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ For the second time in this film festival, we get to see a couple of horses getting it on, and once again it bodes ill for the poor people who have to watch this and the rest of the movie. Rupert Everett (the pretty actor who starred in Another Country and Dance with a Stranger and has been dubbed by the deputy festival director as Pouty Lips) plays Lord Harry, a horse-loving scion and sole heir to an aristocratic Australian family. Unfortunately, Harry has diabetes and when he faints while racing in a carriage, there is an accident that kills his father and injures his arm, which ends up having to be amputated (on-screen; ugh!). But Harry is still keen on driving his horses, and his incredible bitch of a mother still wants an heir, so he hires Ned, a handsome, healthy young man to do all those physical things that Harry can no longer manage. If that made you think something dirty, don’t feel bad. The makers of this film are way ahead of ...

Original post date: 17 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰ ✰   You know Ronee Blakely. She is a country/western singer who used to be on Hee Haw before she became an actress and played the Loretta Lynn-like character in Nashville . More recently, she played the mother in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which she kept telling her daughter she needed to get some sleep. For a while she was married to German director Wim Wenders. She made this weird movie, I guess, to show him that she could do it too. Very personal. Ronee was there in person to answer questions and explain why the sound quality wasn’t better.