FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST (1992, Bill Kroyer)

 

* * * 

Deforestation threatens the creatures who dwell within the magical realm of FernGully.

Starring  Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Jonathan Ward, Robin Williams, Tim Curry 

Written by  Jim Cox

Produced by  Peter Faiman, Wayne Young   

Duration  76 minutes

    

Presenting FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST: myths vs reality.

Myth: Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis have only co-starred in two feature films.

Reality: Between teenage rebellion fable PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990) and muted but fun John Woo actioner BROKEN ARROW (1996), they both lent their voices to FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST. Slater and Mathis play a pair of fairies, zipping in mild flirtation around an idealised rainforest of bright colours and anthropomorphised animals.

Mathis (the lead) plays the stock kids’ animation character of the youngster who dreams of a life outside their restricted community. Seriously, when will they drop this trope? It’s still going strong today, in things like SMALLFOOT (2018) and STRANGE WORLD (2022).

In this particular case, despite being warned to "never go above the canopy", Mathis can’t resist wondering what’s really out there and takes regular peeks, specifically wondering if human beings really exist or if they are merely the stuff of bedtime stories.

Slater, meanwhile, gets the short shrift in a disappointingly small part – he should have insisted on the role ultimately played by Jonathan Ward (see below).

Myth: FERNGULLY has an ecological subtext.

Reality: What’s it called when the subtext is actually on the surface and not at all buried underneath? Oh, that’s right. No, there’s no ecological subtext here – it’s FERNGULLY’s actual text.

You see, it had been assumed by the forest-dwellers that if human beings were actually real and not just the stuff of legends, they would be no threat to them. Then reality comes crashing through in the shape of enormous bulldozers, hellbent on reducing the trees that the adorable (and in some cases make-believe) creatures use as homes into someone’s dining room set.

Myth: Robin Williams made his animated debut playing a hyperactive genie in ALADDIN.

Reality: Before he signed on to be the blue lamp-dweller, he’d already agreed to play Batty Koda in FERNGULLY, a bat who knows that humans do exist because he's come from outside the forest where the two-legged ones have been using him as a lab rat.

Williams is (surprise surprise) the comic relief, and definitely used this as a warm up for the higher-profile part – he's all non-sequiturs, celebrity impressions, shouting, accents and anachronistic pop culture references.

Mercifully, his performance never reaches the irritating ‘heights’ of his more famous Disney role, where he would display so many symptoms of ADHD you wanted to force-feed him Ritalin through the screen.

 

Myth: Only Bart Simpson was saying ‘don’t have a cow’ in 1992.

Reality: Jonathan Ward, as a human lumberjack on whom Mathis uses her forest powers to shrink down to fairy size when he accidently wanders into FernGully, sprouts this nonsensical catchphrase at least once. He also has wavy blonde hair, rides a leaf down a tree trunk like a snowboard, and uses words like ‘bodacious’ and ‘tubular’.

Did I mention that this film was released in the early ’90s?

Myth: FERNGULLY is an American feature.

Reality: Actually, it was a co-production between the USA and Australia; primarily Yank voice talent but set in an Aussie rainforest.

It joins the ranks of other lauded Australian animations, in the great tradition of ... um ... well … did they ever do a cartoon version of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo?

Myth: Tim Curry essayed a wide variety of roles in ’90s movies.

Reality: He always played a snooty shit.

And unlike the meddling hotel concierge in HOME ALONE 2 (1991), or Cardinal Richelieu in THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1993), or Mr Jigsaw in LOADED WEAPON 1 (also 1993), or the duplicitous Romanian philanthropist in CONGO (1995), or Long John Silver in MUPPETS TREASURE ISLAND (1996), here he is literally the embodiment of evil: a dark spirit of the forest or somesuch, resembling a sentient oil spill in appearance, whose role in this affair is to encourage the humans to destroy FERNGULLY ... for reasons I never quite discerned.

As ever, Curry has a great time hamming it up as the dastardly antagonist, and even gets to belt out a musical number like he’s still in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.

Myth: DANCES WITH WOLVES was James Cameron’s biggest influence for AVATAR.

Reality: Plot-wise, AVATAR is DANCES, for sure. But the same basic story is present in FERNGULLY, with the addition of the tree-hugging sensibility. Although it comes from a different perspective this time: we follow one of the natives, not the interloper.

Fellow animated effort EPIC (2013) is also cut from the same cloth, as is Ed Zwick’s 2003 Tom Cruise-starring THE LAST SAMURAI.

Myth: FERNGULLY was a flop.

Reality: It actually did modestly well, plus it birthed a no-stars sequel.

And there were rumours recently of a live-action remake, allegedly set to feature Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jim Carrey and Emma Thompson, which turned out to be bollocks. But someone went as far as to knock up a fake poster, so the desire is clearly out there.

Myth: FERNGULLY is a pretty mediocre and inconsequential cartoon feature film.

Reality: Look, it’s no THE LION KING or BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, or even a ROBIN HOOD or a THE SWORD IN THE STONE. And yes, it piles its agenda on with a shovel.

But it’s a charming enough yarn that has more on its mind than the standard be-yourself-and-find-your-own-path tedium that represents the usual thematic depth that young viewers get targeted at them.

And so, when it ends with a title card saying, ‘For our children, and our children's children,’ the sentiment feels properly earned.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  I’m all for using hyperbole to help make a point and deforestation is clearly a very real thing. But there are definitely still at least some rainforests left out there.

What would a movie called THE FIRST RAINFOREST be about?  According to the National Science Foundation (that nation being the USA): "Ancient Denvers [was] the first rainforest. Time period: 64 million-years-ago in the Early Paleocene (Cenozoic)." Little chance that it was under much threat from JCBs back then.

Previously:  THE LAST HOUSE

Next time:  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HOUSE (2019, Samuel Farmer)

 

* 

An elderly (but tooled up) widow won’t give up her house to land developers because "it ain’t right". They, however, insist "she’s fer sure sellin". There is a clash. 

Starring  Camille Keaton, Scott Peeler, Karen Konzen, Eric Dooley, Christopher James Forrest  

Written by  Samuel Farmer

Produced by  Corina Seaburn, Jonathan Shepard

Duration  74 minutes    

   

In 2015, John Carpenter won a plagiarism case against fellow filmmaker Luc Besson concerning the movie LOCKOUT, which three years earlier the latter had produced. The film – starring a beefed-up Guy Pearce and featuring Maggie Grace getting kidnapped, just like she did in Besson's TAKEN – was a fun-enough sci-fi action romp, mid-budget and delivering middling thrills. Easy to pick up, watch while scrolling your phone, and then forget.

Except Carpenter was paying attention; he or one of his people, anyway. The movie was accused, and ultimately found guilty, of hewing far too close to the director’s own sci-fi action romp, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981). The rescue mission; the penetration of an impenetrable prison; the anti-authoritarian antihero. Consequently, its writing credits expanded to include JC and his ESCAPE co-writer Nick Castle, and those creative originators received enough compensation for Carpenter to be able to afford a lifetime season ticket to his beloved Milwaukee Bucks, and then come home and blissfully play his favourite PC game Dead Space long into the night without worrying about the electricity bill.

Now, when I watched LOCKOUT, not long after it came out, I didn't think about ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK at all – and I think about John Carpenter movies a lot. I as much equated the two films as I do Ed Sheeran’s 'Thinking Out Loud' to Marvin Gaye’s 'Let’s Get It On'. (An example of an unsuccessful plagiarism case.)

On the other hand, in the summer of 2008 I had sat in the cinema watching Neil Marshall’s DOOMSDAY with my mouth agape at how flagrantly it was ripping off ESCAPE. The hero of that movie even has a Snake Plissken eye-patch! And yet DOOMSDAY has remained free of litigation.

And while we're on the subject, what about all those cheapo Italian rip-offs that came out during the ’80s? Why did Carpenter, MAD MAX director George Miller and THE WARRIORS’ Walter Hill never team up and file a class action suit against (among others) 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK, ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX and THE EXTERMINATORS OF THE YEAR 3000, forcing directors Sergio Mantino, Enzo Castellari and Guiliano Carnimeo to cough up billions of their ill-gotten lire?

So, coming to a grisly revenge movie called THE LAST HOUSE, I was fully expecting it to be a THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT rip-off. But it turns out I was wrong – albeit not entirely.

Because despite the title, this film wants to remind you of another grimy, ’70s exploitation flick. What it actually has its sights on is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) – and the poster makes this plenty explicit. THE LAST HOUSE stars that film’s Camile Keaton in another avenging angel role, and wants to do for her what David Gordon Green attempted so earnestly with Jamie Lee Curtis in his ill-judged HALLOWEEN legacy trilogy. This despite there already being an I SPIT ON remake (with sequels!), not to mention that Keaton herself appeared in the direct sequel to the original, subtitled DEJA VU.

But in reality, THE LAST HOUSE skews closer to the truly limp attempt to honour the ‘final girl’ from the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in the 2022 edition of that franchise.

(Sidenote: CHAINSAW 2022 is actually quite fun! Its main target is Gen Z and their attempts to gentrify Leatherface's hometown. Anyone holding a mobile phone aloft to film the chainsaw-flailing maniac's rampage gets their arm severed before getting the chance to post their video on TikTok! I recommend it.)

So, yeah. A class act THE LAST HOUSE most definitely is not. The company names that lead the opening credits do not bode well: "Chance in Hell Productions"; "Bad Man Pictures". Neither does its alternate title: CRY FOR THE BAD MAN.

It’s a home invasion flick. It’s also a ‘sell us your land or we’ll force you off’ story. But what it really feels like is a short film that’s been expanded into a feature – except in length only, with nothing added to its breadth or depth. It feels interminably long for a 74-minute feature, like all they did was take scenes that used to last 20 seconds and pad them out to 15 minutes.

The dialogue feels improvised, but not in an inspired way, more like no one bothered to memorise the script (or was never given one in the first place?), so instead just mumbled out semi-relevant phrases half-remembered from old TV shows and better movies.

The colour is ugly and oversaturated, like the whole movie is the final scene of TAXI DRIVER – except about a hundredth as good as that sounds, since this director handles action like he’s trying to flick a light switch with a broom. 

In a word: avoid.

So are there any genuinely new ideas left in the world? Or are we all just scrapping around the same drying-out pool of inspiration? One thing is for damn sure: there will always be a difference between good execution and total piss-poor fumble-job.

One star out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  It’s one of those middle-of-nowhere gaffs with no neighbours, so it’s the last house on the left and on the right.

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE be about?  Let’s go for a documentary about the origins of house music in the club scene of early-’80s Chicago.

Previously:  LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Next time:  FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021, Edgar Wright)

 

* * 

London, 2021. A fashion student with kind-of clairvoyant powers moves to the city and forms a cross-time connection thing with a young woman from the 1960s.

Starring  Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Michael Ajao, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg

Written by  Edgar Wright, Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Produced by  Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Edgar Wright

Duration  116 minutes

I really wish I enjoyed Edgar Wright’s stuff more. I mean, I should do: I’m in the ideal demographic and generation; his interests overlap with my own; his movies are well-structured, competently made and high in entertainment value. And I was 16 when his breakthrough TV series Spaced was first aired and absolutely loved it.

But somehow, the word that comes to mind when I think of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD and BABY DRIVER is ‘overrated’. None of them are as good as people babble on about, with SHAUN in particular elevated onto a pedestal that puts it above criticism and seemingly giving Wright a pass for life. That film is good, don't get me wrong, but come on: as far as horror-comedies go, it falls short of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, BRAINDEAD, EVIL DEAD II, GREMLINS, CRITTERS, TREMORS, GHOSTBUSTERS, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, BEETLEJUICE, RE-ANIMATOR or THE LOST BOYS.

I do like THE WORLD’S END. That’s the only one that feels like it was made by an adult for adults, where Wright transcends his juvenile dedication to style over substance. He’s similar to Robert Rodriguez in that way, but I’d say I’ve got more out of the cinema of Rodriguez over the years – although to be fair to Edgar, Robert’s own idea of ‘grown up’ is SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO? I’m afraid it's another entry in Wright’s oeuvre of ‘meh’.

We're introduced to Thomasin McKenzie’s Eloise dancing around her bedroom in some kind of homemade dress to Peter & Gordon's ‘World Without Love’, indulging her twin fantasies of becoming a clothing designer and living in the 1960s. She has a goal, she has a passion – but she’s also socially awkward and clumsy in the best Bridget Jones/every-romcom-ever tradition, colliding with her record player (of course she uses vinyl). She also sees her dead mother in the vanity mirror, sowing a supernatural seed into the plot. I’d call this opening sequence an effectively economical bit of scene-setting, if the whole thing didn’t feel so vaguely irritating.

"It's not what you imagine, London. You've got to look out for yourself!" warns her gran when Eloise receives a letter admitting her into the city’s premier fashion college, giving me echoes of those poor girls in THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT who also made the fatal mistake of visiting a major metropolis.

Thankfully, Wright doesn’t have anything nearly as nasty/daring in mind for young Eloise. The next morning, she’s staring wide-eyed out the window of a cross-country train away from whatever backwards but safe hamlet she's from, oversized headphones blasting the reassuring sounds of ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ by The Searchers.

She’s barely out of King's Cross St Pancras before she's forced to endure rapey innuendo from a pervy black cab driver on the way to her dorm. Therein lies further danger in the shape of her roommates/antagonists-in-waiting, who overuse the word ‘babes’, drill her with some exposition-inducing questions and take her to the pub for her first experience of alcohol (which of course they don't have in the countryside) and of hiding in a toilet stall overhearing people she had thought were her friends slagging her off.

Fortunately, Diana Rigg enters the picture as a kindly landlady who offers an escape from the Bitch Patrol by way of an attic room for rent. Eloise moves in quick-smart and, despite the constant flashes of red and blue from a sign outside making it look like she’s in SUSPIRIA (nice try, Edgar), she falls asleep peacefully to ‘You're My World’ by Cilla Black.

(At this point, I started to wonder if Wright had one eye on flogging vinyl-pressed soundtracks to hipsters and misty-eyed Boomers when he came up with this project – and yes, Barry Ryan’s ‘Eloise’ does get an airing.)

During her slumber, our Eloise finds herself embodying Anya Taylor-Joy’s independent-minded singer Sandie in the Big Smoke of the Harold Wilson years. As these flashback-dreams roll on nightly, her EYES OF LAURA MARS psychic-connection to such an empowered female gifts Eloise a renewed confidence during her waking life, demonstrated by how she struts down Carnaby Street with a new hairdo towards college where she wows her teacher with her clothing sketches. But when Sandie realises that all the men she trusted are bastards and have put her on a collision course with coercion, exploitation and murder, the ghosts of the past start to impact Eloise's present and she must truly shake off her passivity once and for all.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO isn’t exactly terrible, but it is a promising concept still in search of a solid film. I keep reading that it's a 'psychological horror' – Edgar's doing his Argento impression, but where's the psychology at? Everything is cartoony and one-dimensional; perhaps the pandemic rushed it into production before the script had gone through sufficient redrafts. McKenzie does her best with her deer-in-the-neon-headlights role, but between this and M Night Shyamalan’s OLD she might want to tell her agent to only give her screenplays that are populated by recognisable human beings.

And the weird anti-London sentiment that Wright (born in Poole, Somerset) peppers throughout really grates, with pearls like "London can be a lot" and "London’s a bad place" – maybe don't spend all your time in fucking Soho, then. (I did however chuckle at Michael Ajao’s bashful, non-threatening love interest admitting that he found hopping over the Thames to the north of the city a really daunting step.)

One definitely pandemic-influenced touch and probably the highlight for me: the John Carpenter-style Panavision shots of empty central London streets during the end credits.

Hmm, now where's that old DVD of HALLOWEEN hiding ...

Two stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  As things wrap up, Eloise is well on her way to fashion-designing success, so it seems unlikely that further evenings in the West End aren’t upcoming.

What would a movie called FIRST NIGHT IN SOHO be about?  Probably dodging so many tourists that eventually you get pissed off and jump on a train to do a reverse-Ajao and have a much better time somewhere south of the river.

Previously:  SAFETY LAST!

Next time:  THE LAST HOUSE

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

SAFETY LAST! (1923, Fred C Newmeyer, Sam Taylor)

 

* * * * 

A young man leaves his village to seek his fortune in the city, with hilarious consequences.  

Starring  Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke

Written by  H M Walker, Jean Havez, Harold Lloyd

Produced by  Hal Roach

Duration  73 minutes   

   

Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing from an air vent in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955). Elliot and his alien pal on a bike in front of the moon in ET (1982). Fred Astaire swinging from a lamp post in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952). Father Merrin arriving outside the house in THE EXORCIST (1973). Janet Leigh screaming in the shower in PSYCHO (1960).

So what is the most iconic image in motion pictures? And where does Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock face way above a busy street in 1923’s SAFETY LAST! figure? And furthermore, to what extent do people (like me) only know that shot because it was paid tribute to in BACK TO THE FUTURE?

I’d wager that most casual moviegoers have no idea from what movie the Monroe sequence is from, either, let alone the plot of SEVEN YEAR ITCH (which is a fairly amusing mid-level Billy Wilder comedy). And I myself certainly had no idea what SAFETY LAST! was all about, save for the hi-jinks promised by the counterintuitive title, and the fact that a bloke hanging on for dear life in such a precarious situation is unlikely to be taken from a study in neo-realism.

I was familiar with Charlie Chaplin; well, I’ve seen CITY LIGHTS (1931). And I knew Buster Keaton; that is to say, I caught THE GENERAL (1926) on TV one time. But I’d never heard of Harold Lloyd, so wasn’t sure if he was going to have as indelible a screen image as those two silent movie titans.

As it turns out, in SAFTEY LAST! Lloyd is playing a character named ... 'Harold Lloyd'. Just like James Spader plays 'James Ballard' in CRASH (1996) after the source novel’s author, except without the creepy implications of that far more twisted story (JG Ballard was never actually part of an underground cult that sexualised car crashes... as far as we are aware). Anyway, movie Lloyd is earnest, naïve and good-natured – not to mention physically dextrous. We like him.

The plot has Lloyd heading off to "the big city" (Los Angeles?) to find employment, so he can then send for his fiancé to join him when he is successful (she, incidentally, is played by Mildred Davis, who looks exactly like every other silent movie actress I’ve ever seen – or maybe I’ve only ever seen her, who knows.) And from there, it’s a sketch-like series of his farcical escapades in menial work, sprinkled with some mistaken identity, due to Lloyd wanting his visiting sweetheart to believe he has risen higher up the corporate ladder than he really has.

And the movie is pretty funny. There are lots of great sight gags: Harold running onto the back of a truck instead of his train; he and his flatmate jumping under their hung-up coats to hide from their rent-happy landlady. And the title cards are often amusing, too, as a substitute for witty spoken dialogue. Really, SAFETY LAST! is a relentless series of moments designed to make you chuckle. And it’s successful, as well as more than a little charming. It’s basically a live-action cartoon. Plus the clock sequence does not disappoint, managing to be a genuinely suspenseful set piece (although given the choice, I’d take Dr Emmett Brown any day of the week.)

So alright, answer me this: does the world need silent movies back? Was anything better before sound? I guess you didn’t get the mixing problems on movies like Chris Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR and TENET, or have to endure an actor’s voice that you find aurally annoying. There’s an efficiency to the storytelling, an unavoidable and welcome reliance on the ‘show, don't tell’ principle.

And it’s not like every technological advance makes the old thing redundant. Take practical effects vs CGI: it’s now a cliche that filmmakers will boast how much a scene is practical and not computer generated, especially a stunt. (This is a far cry from 1998’s LOST IN SPACE, where the marketing gushed so proudly about the project breaking the record for number of onscreen SFX shots with 750.)

But ultimately, let’s face facts: after THE ARTIST kicked up such a big fuss back in 2011, people didn’t suddenly fly out and start making more silent movies, did they? So what does that tell you?

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The entire backend of the film is Lloyd climbing up a building with nothing to stop him falling to his death, so they weren’t joking when they told us that being safe would not figure high on the agenda.

What would a movie SAFETY FIRST! be about?  It would be a lot duller.

Previously:  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME

Next time:  LAST NIGHT IN SOHO 

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (2020, Olivier Megaton)

 

* * 

The not-too-distant future is such a shitshow that the powers-that-be resort to broadcasting a signal that prevents people from engaging in unlawful acts.

Starring  Édgar Ramírez, Michael Pitt, Anna Brewster, Patrick Bergin, Sharlto Copley

Written by  Karl Gajdusek

Produced by  Jesse Berger, Jason Michael Berman, Barry Levine

Duration  149 minutes

  

JAWS is pretty much credited for establishing the summer blockbuster. But more than that, it’s one of the first of what can be classed as a ‘what if?’ movie. In the case of the 1976 hit, it’s a pretty innocuous one: What if a beachside tourist community was threatened by a man-eating shark during the 4th of July weekend?

It wasn’t until the more-is-more ’80s that big idea pictures reached their full potential. Mega producers like Joel Silver and the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer combo made a killing on high concepts that could be summed up in one sentence and had the potential for high stakes, sexy characters, tense culture clashes and enormous ticket sales:

– What if a racist white cop needed a black criminal to crack a case? 48 HRS (1982) (Silver)

– What if a sexy young woman worked as a welder by day and a stripper at night, with dreams of becoming a professional dancer? FLASHDANCE (1983) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a streetwise Detroit cop used his brash ways to investigate a crime in Los Angeles County's snootiest zip code? BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if two virginal nerds manufactured their dream woman and became the most popular guys in school? WEIRD SCIENCE (1985) (Silver)

– What if sexy young pilots flew around in a vaguely competitive tournament, between games of beach volleyball and hanging around the locker-room shirtless? TOP GUN (1986) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a black cop needed a white cop to crack a case, but couldn’t be sure that the white cop wasn’t an unstable suicidal liability? LETHAL WEAPON (1987) (Silver)

– What about one out-of-town New York cop versus 15 European terrorists in an LA skyscraper on Christmas Eve? DIE HARD (1988) (Silver)

– What if it was TOP GUN again, but this time with cars that keep turning left around a big circle while the spectators hope for a crash? DAYS OF THUNDER (1990) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

Now, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is hardly a summer blockbuster; it’s a Netflix original that is unlikely to ever be projected onto a large screen or be subject to queues around the block.

But it does have a what-if scenario that would’ve fit right in during the '80s: What if the US Government made it physically impossible for anyone to commit a crime?

The first thing that comes to mind re: controlling people to lessen antisocial behaviour is Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, where Alex is a guinea pig for a new method that induces revulsion to counteract his naughty urges. Then there’s Brave New World, where Aldous Huxley went the nicey-nicey route for keeping the populace in check – as opposed to 1984, with George Orwell’s "boot stamping on a human face" focus on prevention through disenfranchisement: there can be no thoughtcrime if the state has removed the words to express dissent from your vocabulary. More recently, similar territory to THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME has been explored in THE PURGE movie series, where society is allowed to get all the crime out its system for one anarchic night per year.

Unfortunately, LAST DAYS wraps its intriguing premise up in an uninspired and generic crime thriller. It’s long, but not deep; violent, but unexciting; loud, but not clever. Disappointing, then, but perhaps not surprising, being that it comes to us from the director of TAKEN 2, TAKEN 3 and COLUMBIANA, the implausibly named Oliver Megaton, and that rather than the likes of Burgess, Huxley or Orwell, the source material is some comic book.

It’s the kind of movie where you’ve seen everything before: the plot points, the relationships, the attitudes, the tense interactions ... even the songs have all been used already in other, better movies: ‘Glory Box’ by Portishead (1996's STEALING BEAUTY); The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ (from LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELLS in 1998 – and also recycled from Megaton’s own TRANSPORTER 3!). LAST DAYS turns out to be a heist movie, and the heist, when it eventually comes, is good – but not good enough to make the previous 110 minutes worth enduring.

And by the end, I was left with my own 'what if?' question: what if they'd made THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME with more smarts, or more fun, or more originality – basically anything that could have stopped it becoming a bland, generic, overlong slog that’s worse than even the later PURGE sequels?

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  To paraphrase Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in JURASSIC PARK, crime will find a way.

What would a movie called THE FIRST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME be about?  Someone stealing George Washington’s wooden teeth or something like that.

Previously:  ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Next time:  SAFETY LAST!

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

ABOUT LAST NIGHT (1986, Edward Zwick)

 

* * * 

Two yuppies find romance in mid-’80s Chicago.

Starring  Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins

Written by  Tim Kazurinsky, Denise DeClue

Produced by  Jason Brett, Stuart Oken

Duration  113 minutes

I mean, honestly. Would you fancy trying to sell something called Sexual Perversity in Chicago to a mainstream cinema audience? No, I didn’t think so.

TriStar Pictures weren’t up to the task either, and they probably had Harvard graduates with master’s degrees in marketing and everything. Thus, David Mamet’s play joined a list of adapted works that were released with a different title. It’s a grand tradition that includes BABE (The Sheep-pig), FIELD OF DREAMS (Shoeless Joe), GOODFELLAS (Wise Guy), STAND BY ME (The Body) and BLADE RUNNER (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

Now, Mamet wasn’t involved in the production of ABOUT LAST NIGHT, although the frank, foul-mouthed pitter-patter dialogue certainly sounds like your man, especially the younger Belushi brother's explicit monologue about his own 'last night' that he unleashes towards a rapt Rob Lowe (who, as a notorious '80s sleaze hound, was probably taking notes).

I've never seen the play, but I'm sure it wasn’t totally discarded in the reimagining. So this gives me enough of an excuse to quote from Mamet’s excellent nonfiction book Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business, within which the Chicago-native gives the following writing advice:

The audience will undergo only the journey that the hero undergoes… Similarly, the audience will not suffer, wonder, discover, or rejoice to any extent greater than that to which the writer has been subjected. To suggest that the writer can, through exercise of craft, evade or avoid the struggle of creation is an error congruent with confounding the study of theology with prayer.

In other words, you have to have gone through what your characters go through, or at least your protagonist. Not necessarily literally, but definitely on an emotional level – clearly not everyone has to be Paul Schrader, depressed and living out of his car while scribbling down TAXI DRIVER.

In the case of ABOUT LAST NIGHT, however, there’s not much chance that Mamet, either of the two credited screenwriters or the viewer themselves haven't been through at least some of what our heroes face, even if only vicariously. It’s a pretty by-the-numbers account of well-worn romantic comedy/drama tropes, uncovering little that won’t be familiar from either one's own life or from other movies.

To wit: 

– An act one, getting-to-know-each-other montage, set to a song that seems to be called ‘So Far So Good’ and contains the lyrics "We've no way of knowing/How far this is going/If this isn't love/Then it's in the neighbourhood".

– The male and female pals separately discuss the politics of men telephoning women: frequency, proximity to how recently the lovers last saw each other, etc.

– Moore turns up at Lowe's door and then insists that she's not coming in; smash cut to them having sex in an empty bathtub with the built-in shower on full blast.

– A moving-in-together sequence that features much dropping of boxes and is set to another cheesy song that opines, "And it feels like a home/Though we've just begun/Ain’t it lucky/That we lucked into one another?"

– When Lowe's boss makes an unreasonable demand of him, he replies, "Fuck you!", to which his employer responds, "Fuck me? Fuck you!"

– "I love you" changes everything and is uttered at the exact halfway point, dividing the movie neatly into a ‘will this get serious?’ half followed by a ‘will they go the distance?’ one.

– That second half is full of suspicion and arguments and is waaaaay less fun.

There were few stars more attractive than post-BLAME IT ON RIO, pre-STRIPTEASE Demi Moore, and here her combustive mixture of endearing cuteness and gravel-voiced derision make up for Lowe's blandness – an actor who really only found his voice post-Brat Pack, a couple of seasons into TV's The West Wing. Belushi is billed as ‘James’ and not ‘Jim’, which usually indicates a dramatic role, but here he’s mostly slobbish comic relief and equips himself ably; ditto an hilarious Elizabeth Perkins, who really deserves to be known for more than playing Wilma Flintstone and for seducing a 12-year-old boy in BIG.

So all in all, ABOUT LAST NIGHT isn't terrible. But in terms of films based on David Mamet plays, it's certainly no GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS – which I'm surprised upon adapting no one wanted to rename REAL ESTATE WARS or FIVE ANGRY MEN.

Final thought: the title of this movie is uttered out loud by the characters several times, should you be after a new drinking game.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Not really, as we’re talking about a love affair and not a one-night stand. But I guess it’s catchier than ABOUT ALL THOSE PREVIOUS NIGHTS WE’VE SPENT TOGETHER DURING WHICH SOME THINGS HAPPENED …

What would a movie called ABOUT FIRST NIGHT be about?  That would be the ideal title for a behind-the-scenes DVD feature on the Sean Connery/Richard Gere 1995 Arthurian romp FIRST KNIGHT.

Previously:  THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Next time:  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964, Sidney Salkow, Ubaldo B Ragona)

 

* * * 

The sole survivor of a global plague fights the undead in a post-apocalyptic world. 

   

Starring  Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi Stuart  

Written by  Richard Matheson, William F Leicester   

Produced by  Robert L Lippert  

Duration  86 minutes   

Remakes. Multiple adaptations of the same novel. General lack of new ideas. All in all, it’s not rare for a movie viewer to find themselves watching something that is a version of something else they have already seen. 

And I’m not just talking about newer versions – often it's an earlier release that they've ended up seeing after the modern one.

Such a thing happened with me and 1964’s THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, based on the same novel I Am Legend as the 2007 Will Smith film and Charlton Heston’s THE OMEGA MAN (1971) – both of which I’d seen before this maiden viewing of LAST MAN. But while there were definitely familiar plot points from those later movies, this first stab at putting the story on film had enough of an identity to stand on its own creepy terms – despite novelist Richard Matheson disowning his own screenplay adaptation and asking to be credited under a pseudonym.

The movie kicks off in medias res with gloomy shots of deserted city locations. It’s a powerful start, with a cinematic use of empty space – what you don’t show; what's lurking beyond the frame. John Carpenter (aged 16 at the time) must have been taking notes. A church sign declares "The End Has Come!" – our first hint of just what the hell has happened here.

Our protagonist, Vincent Price, wakes up to an alarm clock. "Better get up," he grumbles in voiceover. "Time to make it through another day." I found it pretty amusing that he’s presented like a regular office drone who hates his job, but has to drag himself out of bed for it anyway. Then, checking his calendar: "Has it only been three years since I inherited the Earth? Seems like a million." The movie is a bit voiceover-heavy in the early stretch, but I guess the alternative would be him talking to himself out loud. Which, hey, after three years alone, you probably would be, just to hear a human voice.

Our man’s first morning duty? Round up the dead bodies outside his house to throw in ‘the pit’, an enormous quarry out of town. That and a perfunctory, lacklustre call out on the CB radio, on the off chance that today is the day that someone actually answers.

His day-to-day involves hunting down the undead creatures that roam the streets (who I guess were just outside of those empty opening shots). And for a while, the movie is merely Price's routine which, for the viewer, starts to risk being a bit overly … routine. He’s mostly just finding the undead in their beds (they sleep?) and giving them a right good stabbing. No stalking or real danger, so not much by way of tension.

And in the casting of oddball Price, our hero isn’t really what you'd call an everyman. Famous for things like HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971), but known to modern audiences for playing the mad scientist who makes sure Johnny Depp can craft hedge animals but not scratch his nose in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (Price is a hero to Tim Burton) and for providing the cackling coda in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, the actor is sort of reminiscent of a demon himself. So, there's a risk in that early stretch of our sympathies actually lying with the ostensible antagonists.

Then Price starts to spend time missing his wife and daughter and having intermittent flashbacks to when they were still alive, so we kind of come round to him again, just in time for the sun to go down, at which point the outside world starts to resemble Croydon town centre on a Saturday night circa 1999, with stumbling and aggressive creatures crawling all over each other in an unsteady rage.

This is one of those horror movies where the creatures are called vampires, but they’re really more like zombies – see also FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996). Vince puts up mirrors and garlic to deter them, and they seek out his blood, but for all intents and purposes they’re the lumbering ghouls of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which wouldn’t come along for another four years.

"There he is, get him!" one of them shouts. Holy shit, they talk? Seems like Price could have tried to reason with them in that case, I mean if they can express cognitive thought? Well, at this point, the rules for zombies (as these definitely are) were not yet fixed – George Romero admitted as much even by the time his NIGHT was released.

One problem with LAST MAN is that the flashing back to how this all happened (caused by a pandemic – eek!) starts to consume the narrative, and we’re over half way through before the story in Price’s present situation moves ahead at all. (It's the same problem that would later manifest itself in fellow 'last movie' THE LAST SEVEN.)

So in the end, the viewing experience turns out to be similar to what the coincidently named (or, rather, nicknamed) Rob Zombie gave us in his (risible) 2007 HALLOWEEN remake. It's like someone did a new version of I AM LEGEND and added far too much unasked-for backstory, leaving themselves with only about 25 minutes at the end to cram in a rushed version of the original. But LAST MAN still works, just about, and I was happy with the direction they went for the ending, which harks back to the source novel’s title and makes those suspicions about whether we are supposed to actually like Price rise right up again.

My biggest disappointment with the film was not in any way THE LAST MAN ON EARTH’s fault. When I saw it had an Italian director and a lot of Italian names in the cast and crew, and found out that it was filmed in Rome standing in for the US, I got rather excited – prematurely, it turned out.

You see, Italy has a great tradition of horror, ranging from the classy Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA, OPERA) and Mario Bava (BLACK SUNDAY, TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE), to gorehounds like Lucio Fulci (ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, THE BEYOND), Ruggero Deodato (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK) and Umberto Lenzi (MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, NIGHTMARE CITY).

Unfortunately, co-director of LAST MAN Ubaldo Ragono doesn’t have similar credentials, the only other feature on his CV being something unpromisingly titled SWEET SMELL OF LOVE. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised when there was no eyeball implement, or maggots crawling out of stab wounds, or girls vomiting up their intestines (alright, those are all from Fulci movies, but he is my favourite Italian horror maniac).

So, I guess the lesson from I can take from this experience is … know what you’re going into any don’t get your hopes up that it will resemble something else? 

Hmm. When has anyone every truly learned from that?

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  We don’t see any other men in the movie. That’s all I’m saying.

What would a movie about THE FIRST MAN ON EARTH be about?  Too easy to go with another Biblical reference. Maybe instead, the first man to cultivate the soil for growing crops, and so really get ‘on’ that there earth?

Previously:  LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL

Next time:  ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com