Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)



Why do people keep ruining James Cameron’s perfectly good endings? First, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley goes through hell to save poor little Newt in Aliens, only to have friggin’ David Fincher whack them both in Alien3 (because, of course, it’s much cooler to kill off beloved, memorable characters than, say, to create interesting new ones). Then, in T2, Cameron finished off the story he began in the original Terminator with a scene of noble, sacrificial self-immolation by the villain-turned-hero/father figure Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger) that clearly implies the threat of a future evil robot dystopia has been averted...and a decade later, we’re right back where we started with Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, Arnie didn’t have to lower himself into that vat of molten lead after all (a scene I could only illustrate with the clip above, since every other version and parody on YouTube has embedding mysteriously disabled, possibly by Skynet). But the scene nevertheless makes my list of great deaths (even though cyborgs can't technically die) because, even more than the hyper-stylized imagery of 300 or Sin City, the fiery shot of the doomed cyborg descending towards oblivion captures the operatic melodrama at the heart of the modern comic book ethos as well as any Mexican standoff in the days when epic grand finales were Sergio Leone’s stock-in-trade. (AO)

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First let me tell you a little about the movie I won’t be telling you about today. As any loyal Unwatchable reader knows, occasionally the IMDb Bottom 100 list presents us with a stumper. As I consulted the list in preparation for today’s entry, the title at #37 struck me as vaguely familiar: Hababam sinifi 3,5. I checked the archives and sure enough, the originally scheduled title for Unwatchable #59 was Hababam sinifi askerde, an earlier installment in the Hababam sinifi series of Turkish comedies. Apparently there’s a hardcore band of Hababam sinifi haters in Turkey…which doesn’t really help my cause since these movies aren’t available in the U.S. However, I was able to find a few YouTube clips, and I like to think this one captures the essence of whatever it is that makes these movies so hateable:

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TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)



In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

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Nicola Graydon of the Guardian checks in with Tony Curtis on the occasion of his new autobiography American Prince, "a rollercoaster of a book in which he’s brutally frank about his childhood, his affairs, stardom, drug addiction, depression, women and sex. Lots and lots of sex. It’s a romp through Hollywood’s golden age, when Curtis, with his thick, black hair and cerulean eyes, practically invented celebrity as we know it." Today, Tony is 83 and hangs out at his home in a Las Vegas suburb with his wife of ten years, sitting in a wheelchair and concentrating on his painting. It was sixty years ago this year that he signed his first studio contract, his first step in becoming box office catnip. And as one of the enduringly moviestruck of major Hollywood movie stars, he can get misty-eyed about his status as one of the last living links to the final years of the old studio system. “Poor darlings, they’re all dead. Sinatra, Brando, Cary Grant. They’ve all gone.”

In Curtis's studio, reporter finds herself "surrounded by canvases of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in the same pose, head turned away, laughing, in slightly different colours, all with slightly prominent nipples." Curtis, who says that he has "an affinity for women," elaborates on his romantic past:

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Like Christmas movies, Easter movies have only so many iconic touchstones to wave to declare their allegiance to the holiday, but it seems as if Christmas gets more mileage out of its storehouse than Easter does out of its two major devotional images: the resurrection of the Christian Messiah, and cute fluffy bunnies. A glance at the TV listings shows that movies that feature crucifixions clearly predominate on the weekend schedule, even as they tend to shut out movies made by Martin Scorsese or Robert Downey, Sr. But a few minutes of most Biblical movies, especially when compared to the work of Chuck Jones, may leave you wondering if the rabbit movies don't really have the inside track. Night of the Lepus may be the perfect Easter movie just because it makes an effort to meet both camps halfway: it depicts the human race buying itself a second chance at life by crucifying (okay, electrocuting) several acres' worth of giant, rampaging bunny rabbits. Inexplicably, TV programmers have yet to seize on it as a holiday perennial, and the chances that this might be the year that changes got even smaller when Turner Classic Movies ran it last weekend as part of its "TCM Underground" series, thus indicating that the network not only has a real counter-instinct for innovative holiday programming, but that somebody over there detects an unsuspected outlaw-cinema vibe in Stuart Whitman.

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