Western Wednesday: My Name is Nobody (1973)

In 1973, the year before Blazing Saddles released, the spaghetti western was dead. Sergio Leone had already made what many consider to be the greatest western of all time. His assistant director on the first two Dollar films, Tonino Valerii, went on to direct Day of Anger with Lee Van Cleef. So it was surprising that Leone arranged to have Valerii direct My Name Is Nobody, a send-up of the subgenre they had defined.

Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) is a bit of a legend in the gunslingin’ world, which means he frequently has to dispatch the men who’ve come to kill him for rep. In the aftermath of his latest shootout, a bystander asks, “Is there anyone faster?” The reply: “Nobody.” Enter Nobody, a childlike wanderer played by Terence Hill.

Three bad guys attempt to dupe Nobody into delivering a booby trapped picnic basket to Jack. Nobody agrees. When Jack asks what’s in the basket, Nobody says, “Oh, this? I reckon it’s a bomb.” To which Jack replies, “I reckon you’re right.” Nobody tosses the basket back to the bad guys and yells, “He didn’t want it!” as the basket explodes.

Meanwhile, a group of bandits known as the Wild Bunch (an intentional reference to Sam Peckinpah, whose name also appears on a grave marker) are laundering stolen gold by passing it off as the production of a dummy mining operation. Although Jack assumes Nobody is just another gunslinger who’s come to kill him for a shot at fame, Nobody reveals that he idolizes the gunslinger; he actually wants Jack to take on the gang single-handedly so that his name can go down in history books. Jack just wants to quietly retire to Europe.

Like Two Mules for Sister Sara, My Name is Nobody is not what I’d call a classic, but it’s more memorable than most movies. Then again, maybe it’s only memorable because we’ve seen some of these scenes a hundred times before, only this time Leone and Valerii have turned them into gags. Also in on the joke: Ennio Morricone, whose score plays like a parody of his own works. You get the feeling these guys weren’t mourning the death of the spaghetti western, but merrily digging its grave.

Midnight Movie: Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

Kick the Dog: When a character does something evil for no apparent gain, because the author wants to demonstrate that he’s not a nice guy and shift audience sympathy away from him.

—TVtropes

Richard Lynch, who plays the cartoonishly cruel villain in Invasion U.S.A., does an awful lot of dog-kicking. In the opening scene, he poses as a U.S. Coast Guard who rescues a dozen Cuban refugees, helplessly adrift at sea, before gunning them all down. (It’s later revealed he even gunned down the men who helped him gun down the refugees.) In another scene, he throws a badly injured woman out the upper-floor window of a building after shooting Billy Drago’s pecker off. For his next act, he blows up a suburban neighborhood with a rocket launcher while apparently using an infinite ammo cheat.

Lynch’s plan involves flooding the United States with hundreds of terrorists who will then pose as policemen and civilians in between random acts of unkindness, mainly bombings and mass shootings. No reasons, no motives. Just pure terrorism.

Chuck Norris is our reluctant hero, this time playing a retired CIA agent living in the Everglades. He’s asked to come back for one last mission, but refuses on the grounds he’s perfectly happy doing… whatever it is he’s doing. As far as I can tell, his life mostly involves driving around in an airboat, trapping gators, and watching an armadillo drink milk from a dog bowl. What’s great about director Joseph Zito is he’s smart enough to limit these necessary but boring scenes; it won’t be long until Lynch’s men show up to kill Chuck’s only friend and blow up his house.

Back then, we all knew exactly what we were getting from the latest Chuck Norris film. Few of them ever promised anything deeper. They did so well because they appeased moviegoers’ desire to see something stupidly entertaining, the operative word being “entertaining.” There’s something pure about Invasion U.S.A., which has amazing stunts and action sequences, even if the logic leading up to them is inexplicable.

Consider the shootout in a mall. Two bad guys come crashing out of a plate-glass window in a pickup truck. You’d think after hearing all the gunfire and explosions inside, most pedestrians would’ve scattered long ago. Yet a woman walking along the sidewalk stops to scream at the henchmen for nearly running her over. The passenger takes a handful of her hair and the men drive off with her hanging from the side of the truck. Meanwhile Chuck Norris pursues in a commandeered convertible.

The logical thing for the bad guys to do? Simply toss the woman onto the street in front of Norris’s car, forcing him to screech to a halt. Instead, the bad guys drive a couple of miles with the woman screaming the entire way. You get the feeling that screenwriters Chuck and his brother, Aaron Norris, were sitting around a typewriter (or maybe Crayons and paper), saying things like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”

And it is cool. Just because Chuck Norris has the emotional complexity of a turd, it doesn’t mean his absurdly violent fantasies aren’t valid forms of art. Invasion U.S.A. is probably my favorite Chuck Norris film. The director also made my favorite Friday The 13th film: The Final Chapter. Those two films won’t seem like anything special to the casual viewer, but to those of us who indulge in fine cheese, he’s a master.

Western Wednesday: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

For a film that shows up this quietly on VOD after a limited theater release, Bone Tomahawk is much better than it has any right to be. Twenty years ago, the same film would have been advertised extensively before dominating the box office for a week or two—maybe more depending on the competition. There’s a scene so shocking, people would have talked about it the way they talked about the big reveal in The Crying Game or the leg-cross in Basic Instinct. Nothing about its quality suggests it was made by a first-time director, either.

A couple of outlaws, played by Sig Haig and David Arquette, stumble onto the sacred burial ground of the “trogdolytes,” a small sect of inbred cannibals. The trogdolytes promptly kill Haig as Arquette flees to a nearby town. Samantha (Lili Simmons) is recruited to operate on the outlaw’s injured leg while her husband, Arthur (Patrick Wilson), stays at home recuperating from a leg injury of his own. The following morning, the sheriff (Kurt Russell) discovers the outlaw, Samantha, and even the deputy have been kidnapped in the middle of the night. The sheriff gathers a search party and sets out to find the cannibals’ cavern. It’s in the agoraphobic expanses of the wild west that this group stumbles into horror movie territory.

I can probably count the number of movies that legitimately unsettled me on one hand. Bone Tomahawk is one of them. A lot of horror films coddle the audience to the point that even a child can reliably predict who’ll be left standing by the end. No one’s safe in this film. When the hero starts out with a bum leg, you already know it’s not the kind of story in which differences can be solved by a routine shootout.

That shocking scene I mentioned earlier is something so sick and jarringly twisted, Bone Tomahawk will likely spread through word of mouth until it’s a household name. I just can’t imagine a movie this incendiary can come and go so quietly. See it today and recommend it to everyone you know so that it can obtain its cult status sooner rather than later.

Midnight Movie: Elves (1989)

“You’ve got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everyone I saw them!” — 7 year old boy to his sister.

Three edgy teenage girls who call themselves “the sisters of anti-Christmas” convene in the woods to “bemoan Christmas as a petty, over-commercialized media event.” One of them asks, “What’s ‘bemoan?'” The ringleader replies: “It means I didn’t get any good presents last year.” I unironically love shit like this.

One of the girls cuts her hand when a candle holder inexplicably shatters. Spooked by the strange occurrence, the girls freak out and run, but not before dripping blood on what’s presumably the burial spot of a demonic elf… or something. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in the preliminary scenes, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is there is now a monstrous elf lose in the world. Calling the monster a puppet would be too kind. It’s more like a barely articulate torso, which the special effects crew merely shoves into frame from time to time.

Before we go further, I have to point out that the den mother’s little shit of a brother spies on her in the shower. When she catches him, he says, “I’m not a pervert, I like seeing naked girls!” Later the boy is attacked by the troll in the middle of the night. When the mother tries to convince him it was only a nightmare, he responds with poetic delivery: “No, it was a fucking little ninja troll!” The mother decides it was the family cat who scratched the kid, so she drowns the pet in the toilet.

Enter Dan Haggerty—yes, Grizzly Adams. He’s a recovering alcoholic, ex-homicide detective who just so happens to have a bit of knowledge of the occult. He falls into the role of a department store Santa after the previous one is repeatedly stabbed to death in the nards. To make matters worse, Grizzly Adams has just been evicted from his camper trailer. Soon after, he discovers a clue the homicide detectives missed and follows the trail.

Meanwhile, the teenage main character and her airhead friends decide to have an after-hours party in the department store, which is coincidentally where Grizzly Adams is sleeping nowadays. They invite their born-to-die-in-a-movie-like-this boyfriends who arrive shortly before three Nazi goons appear, who’re hunting the elf for reasons you won’t fully understand until later on (if it at all).

Not only is the plurality of “Elves” bullshit, it’s hardly about the singular elf, either. The film is so thoroughly messed up on a technical level, the laughs are frequent. My biggest complaint is the film’s insincerity: there are several hints that indicate the filmmakers were trying to make a bad movie, including a Chinatown parody, an obvious Mommy Dearest reference, and the pulpy integration of Nazi mythology (“The Fourth Reich,” as Grizzly Adams calls it). It’s not quite as obnoxious as modern attempts at self-aware cheese, which makes it entertaining enough to watch with an audience, especially when the wheelchair-bound grandfather professes… eh, best not to spoil it.

I love Elves. Haggerty may not have been the best actor, but he’s got a unique screen presence, which makes me wish he had ended up in more movies like this. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but gimmicks can be fun, too.

Several internet sources claim this film is rated PG-13. There’s no way the version I saw would get a PG-13 rating, so there may be a censored version floating around. There’s a good amount of blood, a close-up of a cokehead getting stabbed repeatedly in the crotch, full frontal nudity, and a kid who cusses roughly as much as a comic on Def Comedy Jam. If any of those elements are absent in your copy, you might as well just turn it off and find a better source wherever you can. Who knows, maybe the full movie is on YouTube?

Western Wednesday: La Resa dei Conti (The Big Gundown)

Grindhouse Releasing’s rich packaging for The Big Gundown is immediately inviting, which is strange because I rarely care about such things. I expected two or three discs, but four? With this edition, you’ll get the American version of the film on Blu-Ray and DVD, the Italian-language version of the director’s cut, La Resa dei Conti, with optional subtitles as opposed to dubbed voice work, and a CD containing Morricone’s score. I’ve listened to the soundtrack five times now. I’m listening to it as I write this.

The movie opens on a trio of outlaws trying to outrun the famous bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett (Lee Van Cleef in his first leading role at the age of forty-one). What they don’t know is he isn’t following them. He’s actually well ahead of ’em. When they fall into his trap, he tells them they either get the gun or the rope as he calmly chooses a single a bullet for each of the men. A few days later, Corbett is attending a wedding party where a Texas railroad tycoon (Walt Barnes) convinces him to run for senator. Corbett agrees it’s time to settle down, but only after going on one last bounty: to apprehend a child murderer.

Soon after the manhunt begins, Corbett thinks he found the guy. The suspect draws on him and Corbett guns him down with ease. Corbett confesses disappointment, saying, “I thought he’d be smarter.” Naturally, the movie can’t end there, so it turns out Corbett killed the wrong guy (conveniently enough, the wrong guy was wanted for murder anyway). We learn the guy he’s really after is smarter when he successfully gives Corbett the slip.

The name of the bounty is Cuchillo and he’s played by Cuban actor Tomás Milián. The filmmakers want you to believe Cuchillo is a master escape artist, but here’s one of my few complaints: Corbett becomes uncharacteristically incompetent whenever he catches up to Cuchillo. The tricks Cuchillo plays on Corbett just wouldn’t work on the kind of godlike bounty hunter who can arrange a trap ahead of the outlaws who think he’s behind them. There’s a line later in the movie that kind of explains why Corbett gets downright stupid at times, but it’s a bit of a cheat.

Leonard Maltin called The Big Gundown the best spaghetti western without Leone’s name on it. I wouldn’t agree, but it’s up there—like, way up there—among the absolute best. There are plenty of great scenes, beautiful camera work, and a ton of production value. I am unconditionally in love with this film and Grindhouse Releasing’s presentation. It’s worth every penny.

Midnight Movie: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started this feature, as the film is entirely lacking in cheese, but it’s got everything else I love about exploitation films: physical conflict, urgent characters, quick women, and tons of senseless violence. On this dreary cold day, I was simply in the mood for Peckinpah.

When the powerful El Jefe (Emilio Fernández) finds out who impregnated his teen daughter, he puts a million dollar bounty on the man’s head (literally). Months later, a couple of the tie-wearing goons end up in a rundown bar in Mexico City, asking questions about Garcia. It’s there they meet the American piano player, Bennie (Warren Oates), who plays stupid. He really doesn’t know where Garcia is, but he suspects his prostitute girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega), just might.

Not only does Elita know where Garcia is, she’s been planning on leaving Bennie for him. Alfredo Garcia has promised to marry Elita, while Bennie remains reluctant to commit. None of that matters, though, as he comes to realize Garcia’s been dead and buried for a few days now. Armed with this new information, Bennie blows off Elita and seeks out the goons in their hotel room. He agrees to bring them the head of Alfredo Garcia in exchange for ten grand, not knowing the original bounty is much, much higher than that. They agree, giving him a deadline of a few days. They probably don’t have to mention it, but they do anyway: if he runs out on the deal, they’ll have his head.

The night before his journey into the Mexican countryside, Elita visits Bennie in the middle of the night to make up. In the morning, he’s merrily disinfecting crabs with bedside booze. Later, he proposes marriage, but neither he or Elita seem entirely convinced by his newfound enthusiasm. Nonetheless, he brings her along for the trip, which proves to be a mistake when they run into a couple of motorcycle-riding rapists, one of whom is played by Kris Kristofferson. If anything illustrates the stark contrast between the gritty realism of 70s and the almost entirely PG-13 rated present, it’s that music/movie stars used to cameo as despicable thugs. Try to imagine Will Smith or Justin Timberlake doing the same for their careers.

My favorite thing about movies like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and crime films in general, is they can take otherwise decent people and put them in soul-altering situations. Bennie, a U.S. Army vet, has no qualms about gunning down criminals, so it’s not taking a man’s life that threatens his soul. No, it’s the moment he digs Garcia up and looms over the corpse with a machete in hand. I believe that’s what plot-heavy screenwriters refer to as an “inciting incident.” Once he crosses that line, there’s no turning back. The descent has begun and the only way out is to continue downward.

Much of the last third of the movie is Bennie justifying his increasingly disturbing decisions to Garcia’s lifeless head, which has begun to draw flies as well as stares from the locals. These monologues, as Bennie continuously unravels, are like something out of an acid western. Warren Oates should’ve been the leading man in a lot more films, which makes Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia more precious. It’s an exhilarating, completely unpretentious joyride with a mad man behind the wheel. And if you’re wondering if “mad man” refers to Peckinpah or the hero, take your pick. It hits hard and kicks ass.

Western Wednesday: Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

“Everybody’s got a right to be a sucker once.”

A gunslinger stumbles upon a damsel in distress in the middle of the desert. This time the gunslinger is Clint Eastwood and the damsel is Shirley MacLaine. The two of them play Hogan and Sara. After Hogan guns down the group of bad guys, Sara puts her clothes back on. Hogan’s thrown for a loop when he sees the habit and the rosary. He doesn’t feel right leaving a nun all alone in the desert so he agrees to take her with him, even after he discovers Sara’s in deep shit with the French for providing money and support to Mexican revolutionaries.

Two Mules for Sister Sara is primarily a comedy that often forgets it’s a western. Then it overcompensates in its climax, which is jarringly violent considering what came before it. The film is pretty funny, sure, but it must have been disappointing to see it during its original run, only a year after the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is a lot more evenly cooked.

The running gag: although she’s a nun, Sara says and does some unladylike things. After Hogan helps her climb a tree, he apologizes for touching her bottom. “It’s no sin that you pushed me up the tree with your hands on my ass,” she says. Hogan’s double-take of her language is priceless. But that’s pretty much all this movie is: funny. There’s some amusing dialog, good writing, and a touching moment or two, but overall it’s playing it just a little too safe.

It comes from a time when westerns were like Marvel movies (plentiful) and the studios were just as reluctant to adjust a winning formula as they are today. That so many people seem to consider Two Mules for Sister Sara to be some kind of classic sets the bar for classics just a little too low. It’s a good movie and I’ll probably even watch it again someday, but I don’t know about great.

Midnight Movie: Sonny Boy (1989)

Note: The version I saw is six minutes shorter than the unrated cut, which was only released in the UK. There’s a special place in hell for proponents of film censorship.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie modified for a 4:3 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, VHS or Laserdisc is the only way you can currently see Sonny Boy, a weird little film that never made the leap to modern formats. Pan and scan this terrible is like trying to watch a movie through a telescope. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s worth watching it this way until the film is given a proper release.

Sonny Boy opens on a secluded motel where a young couple are being spied on by a desert thug named Weasel (Brad Dourif from the Child’s Play movies). Weasel murders the couple and takes off in their convertible, which he tries to sell to the local crime boss, Slue (Paul Smith, who played Bluto in Robert Altman’s Popeye). Slue lives in a junkyard with his wife, Pearl (David Carradine, who also sings the theme song of the film). As Slue and Weasel are negotiating the price of the stolen convertible, Pearl notices there’s a baby in the backseat who she immediately adopts as her own.

So what happens when a baby is raised by a trio of monsters? First, they give him “the gift of silence” by cutting out his tongue. Then, in a montage of Sonny Boy’s formative years, we see how Slue and Weasel physically torture the boy in order to toughen him up for the real world. These games of abuse culminate in Sonny Boy’s rite of adulthood, in which Slue ties the boy to a stake and Weasel lights a ring of fire around him. You’ll see Pearl desperately trying to put the fire out with a tiny bucket of water. She merely shakes her head as if to say, “Oh, boys will be boys.”

I know this sounds horrific, but it’s kind of sweet within the surreal, dark comedy context of the film. The director makes no excuses for the way his characters behave, but it’s clear this is the only way this group of people know how to raise a kid. You begin to wonder if the reason they lack a moral compass is the same reason Sonny Boy lacks one: perhaps they were raised like animals, too. Anyway, one day Sonny sees himself in the mirror for the first time, face covered with the blood of Slue’s enemy, which inspires the man-boy to begin the long, difficult process of deprogramming himself.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the film (such as an overly explanatory voiceover, a cheat of an ending, and a hamfisted message about tolerance, acceptance, yatta, yatta, yatta), but it’s clear the movie is a labor of love. There’s creative cinematography, a great cast, and an unwillingness to make the film something it isn’t in order to satisfy more commercial audiences. According to some sources on the internet, the subject matter of Sonny Boy was so disturbing, theaters pulled it from showings within days of its release. I don’t buy that at all because the film simply isn’t that disturbing. I think the real reason it was pulled is couldn’t have been a crowd-pleaser in 1989, which was probably the biggest year for blockbuster films up until that point.

Ultimately, what’s most satisfying about Sonny Boy is its unusual restraint. You would expect crass comedy when the star of Kung Fu appears in a dress, but it doesn’t treat the crossdresser like a joke. Sure, there are people who get thoroughly blown to bits by artillery shells, but if you’re looking for a raunchy exploitation film to show a rowdy crowd, Sonny Boy isn’t it. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth a watch, though.

2016 Update: an unrated cut of the film has finally been made available on Blu-Ray by Shout Factory.

Western Wednesday: Django (1966)

Django begins with the titular gunslinger (Franco Nero) dragging a coffin through all manner of terrain. Later, when he finally makes it to a saloon, someone asks him if there’s a body in the box. Django replies, “Yeah. His name is Django.” I won’t tell you who’s actually in the box. You’ll find out about a third of the way into the picture.

Seconds after the opening credits, Django happens upon a gruesome scene: a gang of bandits are preparing to bludgeon a prostitute to death. You expect Django to intervene, but he doesn’t. Instead, he watches from afar as a second gang swoops in and lays waste to the first. You think the prostitute’s life has been spared until you realize they’re only untying her to retie her to a cross, which they intend to torch. “Burnin’s a lot better than getting beaten to death,” they assure her. (Is it, though?)

You get the feeling Django has been hoping he doesn’t have to get involved. Then it’s clear it’s no longer his decision to make; he’s operating on autopilot when he approaches the men and says in his dubbed voice, “If I bothered you, would you accept my apology?” A split second later his pistol comes out, blazing hellfire, and drops five men in the blink of an eye.

After saving the prostitute’s life, Django takes her to town, finds a room, and meets the leader of the local Klan, Major Jackson. Jackson gets his rocks off on hunting innocent Mexicans for sport. After gunning down over forty of Jackson’s men, Django finds himself at the center of a war between Jackson’s gang and bandits.

It sounds a lot more clichéd than it is. Django’s the real deal—a character of such popularity and charm he’s been portrayed by a dozen different actors in dozens of movies following this one. Like a lot of legends, the details change depending on who’s telling it, but overall the important stuff remains the same. Sure, it’s mostly style over substance, but Django is tragic, shamelessly entertaining, and absurdly violent for its time. If you’ve never seen it before, be prepared to get amped.

Midnight Movie: The Visitor (1979)

The Visitor opens on a plane of unreality in which a force of good (John Huston) comes face to face with a force of evil. When the evil flings off its sacramental robe, it reveals it has taken the form of a little girl. Cut to a different plane of existence: Italian actor Franco Nero, in Christ-like garb, tells a group of bald disciples the mystical backstory concerning these warring forces. My eyes glazed over at this long, dull explanation, which is probably why I had so much trouble following the rest of the movie.

Maybe I would have been lost anyway, but a great deal of The Visitor suddenly made sense in the end. I hoped to be taken on a cosmic trip, but with exposition like Nero’s, the film is like winning a free vacation, but finding out you have to listen to a timeshare pitch first. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie because it’s actually quite good for borrowing so heavily from so many different sources. (Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen came to mind for me. Others have compared it to everything from The Exorcist to Star Wars.) Despite its obvious influences, you’ve never see anything like it.

Following its dreamlike prologue, the audience is whisked away to a basketball game in Atlanta, Georgia. When the away team nearly turns the score over in the final seconds, a little girl in the front row uses her supernatural powers to make the basketball explode in the player’s hands. (No one seems to think it’s weird that the basketball blew up like a Tannerite-stuffed piñata.)

The eight year old girl responsible is accompanied by her mother, played by Joanne Nail (Switchblade Sisters). Nail’s character is being courted by Lance Henriksen, the owner of the basketball team. Henriksen proposes to the girl’s mother, who refuses his offer despite creepy persistence. We soon learn Henriksen is an agent of evil when we see him in the boardroom of rich and powerful Illuminati types. The mysterious figures, led by Mel Ferrer, remind Henriksen that their evil plot hinges on Nail getting pregnant again.

Meanwhile John Huston’s character arrives on Earth. He can freely hop between realms, but requires a commercial airliner to take him to Atlanta. When the little girl discovers her arch-nemesis is now on Earth, she angrily uses her Omen-like powers to turn a birthday gift into a loaded gun and promptly shoots her mother in the spine. This “accident” leads to a couple more surprisingly high-profile talents: Shelly Winters and Glenn Ford, who play the new nanny and a police detective. Eventually the film will introduce Nail’s ex-husband, a doctor played by Sam Peckinpah.

The problem with The Visitor (and I’m nitpicking here because the more I think about it, the more I like it) is it has too much plot for what it wants to be. And it’s a plot that will be just a little too familiar for fans of pre-Halloween horror. I usually love movies like this and I’m no stranger to psychedelic journeys, but no one’s asking the directors of acid films to stitch their visual exercises together with coherent—but ultimately pointless—plots. I just feel The Visitor would work a lot better if it didn’t try to be so damned routine in between its short bursts of wonderful lunacy.