The Screengrab : bruce campbell

Sam Raimi Gets Back to Basics with "Drag Me to Hell"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi earned the love and devotion of geeks everywhere with the Evil Dead pictures and the original comic book movie Darkman, then rolled up his sleeves and proved to the industry that he could suck it up and direct Kevin Costner (in the sensitive Crash-Davis-at-midlife picture For Love of the Game) if that's what it took to get them to trust him with Spider-Man. Three web-slinger movies later, Raimi has finally gotten in a position where he can make another horror flick, this time with a budget and a highly regarded young actress, Alison Lohman, in the Bruce Campbell part. James Rocchi stopped by the set of Drag Me to Hell to observe. "It's a long-standing piece of trivia," he writes, "that Raimi wears a suit to the set every day, in the mold of Alfred Hitchcock, so I made sure I put on an appropriate suit-and-tie combo for our visit. When Raimi came over to meet us, though, he was wearing a T-shirt and blazer, unshaven, relaxed and happy. Looking me up and down, he laughs: 'I see one member of the press dressed appropriately.'"

The script, which Raimi co-wrote with his brother Ted, who could cure cancer tomorrow and still remain best known to most of the world as Joxer the Mighty from Xena: Warrior Princess, casts Lohman as a loan officer at a bank who chooses to deny an old woman the loan she needs to keep from losing her home because Lohman is angling for a promotion and wants to impress her boss with her ruthlessness. It turns out that the old woman is a witch who retaliates by cursing Lohman with an evil spirit. It's torn from today's headlines, though it's not immediately clear who we're supposed to root for. Raimi says that "my brother and I wanted to write a story about a woman who, like in a lot of morality tales, has a choice to do good or evil, makes a sinful decision, and ends up paying the price for it -- or not, if she can escape."

Raimi also believes that Drag Me to Hell "is a little more complex in some ways than the Evil Dead movies, but the Evil Dead movies were suspense and scares and gross-outs and trying to be fun and funny. This is trying to do the same thing, but we're also trying to base how it kicks off in a way that's ... I don't want to say 'a little more real-world', because, at the time, believe it or not, I was trying to make the beginning of those movies 'real.' All I can say is this is a PG-13 picture, so it's a little less assaultive than the Evil Dead movies, which were unrated films." For those of us with fond memories of Bruce Campbell pulling a demon's dick off and the infamous sexual assault by forest in the first Evil Dead picture, that PG-13 business is ominous; the greatest suspense element connected to the movie may be waiting to see whether Raimi can still do this shit, or whether his acceptance by the industry will inhibit his grisly creativity. There may be signs of hope in the words of special effects chief Greg Nicotero, who recalls that Raimi brought him on board with a pep talk: "Listen, this is back to traditional stuff ... I want to use animatronics and puppets and dummy heads. None of that CG stuff. Get that crazy crap out of here!" Instead, Nicotero says, "We were designing rotted corpses and demon makeup and possession makeup," adding, "In this instance Sam wanted to stick with the traditional prosthetics, like puppets." No crazy stuff there, for sure.

Set Your DVR!: May 1 - May 3

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary that puts a new spin on the concept of "world music." The Monks consisted of five American GIs who began playing together when they were all stationed in Germany in 1964. It was after they were discharged from the service that they fell in with Walther Niemann and Karl-H. Remy, a couple of artsy types who repackaged them as "the Monks", complete with Friar Tuck haircuts, black clothes, and nooses worn as neckties. The look made it a lot harder to confuse them with the Dave Clark 5, but the Monks already stood apart from the '60s pack for their lack of interest in lush and catchy melodies in favor of a focus on minimalist rhythmic experimentation. Heard today, it's easy to take them for a likely influence on the Velvet Underground and such post-punk giants as Wire and Gang of Four. Both well-informed and worshipful towards its subject, the doc achieves a tone somewhere between a 33 1/3 book and a raving fan who acts as if he's been up for three days, which is kind of appropriate. It makes its cable debut on The Sundance Channel on Friday, May 1, 11:00 PM central/midnight eastern, four days before its release on DVD, and four months after founding member Dave Day died of a heart attack.

This week's "TCM Underground" premiere on Turner Classic Movies is Sam Raimi's 1987 Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn [late Friday night, 1:00 AM central/2:00 AM eastern]. In addition to coming in handy for anyone who just can't wait until the June return of Burn Notice to get their Bruce Campbell fix, it may serve as a reminder to those working on the Farrelly brothers' Three Stooges revival that Raimi and Campbell already did it best, and with just the one actor. TCM Underground has been supplementing its cult beauties with vintage documentary shorts that are apparently chosen for their camp value, but they're following Evil Dead 2 with Changing [2:30 AM central/3:30 AM eastern], a 28-minute, 1971 film, sponsored by "the National Institute of Mental Health", that profiles a working-class family man who's been letting his beard grow out and developing what some around him clearly see as unsettling, radical attitudes; they include treating his wife as an equal partner in their marriage and refusing to work extra shifts because he needs the time to connect with his children. (He also wants to be able to pass a joint around when he's relaxing with his friends but also wants to reserve the right to worry about his kids learning to sniff glue.) The central figure, who today looks like three-quarters of the young male adult population of red state America, expresses disdain about being called a "hippie", and with good reason: he's just an average working stiff who's found that, by adopting some of the healthier changing social attitudes going on around him, he's been able to improve his life, though he's baffled and a little hurt that some people, such as his workplace "family", feel the need to react as if he'd betrayed them and the American Way of Life. If somebody today were to make a fiction film about someone in a similar situation in that place and time, it's hard to imagine it coming out as free of smugness and condescension.

In the mornings to come, TCM is running a few pictures worth seeing that don't happen to be (currently, legally, readily, whatever) available on DVD. The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) [Saturday, May 2: 5:00 AM central/6 AM eastern] is the prize jewel from Budd Boetticher's career that got left out of last year's box set containing all the director's Westerns with Randolph Scott. Compared to those highly functional, economical B-movies, Bullfighter is a lusher, visually colorful, melodramatic work starring Robert Stack as an American who persuades a celebrated matador (Gilbert Roland) to tutor him as a bullfighter. TCM 's version is a good half hour longer than the version released by the studio, and is an often stirring testimony to the photogenic star power of Gilbert Roland and Mexico itself. Then on Sunday, May 3: 7:00 AM central/8:00 AM eastern, TCM runs Bombshell (1933), with Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy, Frank Morgan, and Franchot Tone, one of the earliest, and funniest, of Hollywood's self-satires.

Trailer Review: Drag Me to Hell

Paul Clark — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Can the director of one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing trilogies of all time return to his roots? This is the question that faces longtime fans of Sam Raimi, who began his career with gonzo horror-comedies before becoming one of Hollywood’s big-ticket filmmakers with the Spider-Man franchise. And while Drag Me to Hell looks to be slicker than his classic Evil Dead movies, it’s nonetheless a heartening development in Raimi’s career, a sign that despite the mainstream fare he’s made in the ensuring years, he’s not ashamed of his beginnings. As for the trailer itself, I think it looks pretty promising. The movie appears to have the same moral underpinnings as much of the best horror films- in this case, punishing the heroine (played by Alison Lohman) for trying to further her career at the expense of others. It’s a little hard to get a read on the horror stuff due to the jackhammer editing, but based on what I could make out, Raimi hasn’t lost his ability to go for broke in the interest of scaring the audience. In other words, I’m there. Only one question remains: where’s Bruce Campbell?

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD (2006)

A while back, I started blogging about the summer I spent working for Troma Films as a production assistant (and eventual second assistant director, co-screenwriter and co-star) of the company’s terrible, terrible superhero spoof, Sgt. Kabumikman, NYPD. One of these days, I’ll eventually continue that tale, but in a nutshell, Troma (which allegedly stands for Tits R Our Main Attraction) was founded in 1974 by Yale grads Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz to produce and distribute softcore sex romps and, eventually, their own unique brand of gross-out message movies, chock full of gratuitous monsters, violence, nudity and critiques of corporate malfeasance. The fact that Troma’s stayed in business for so many years as one of the only truly independent production companies in America would probably be more inspiring if their exploitation films weren’t so consistently godawful (despite the cult popularity of “hits” like The Toxic Avenger, Tales From The Crapper, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.). Having watched (and even helped to create) hours and hours of the company’s poorly acted, juvenile and just plain ugly swill, I must say I was pleasantly shocked by the uncharacteristically high quality of the poopy jokes in Poultrygeist, the company’s most recent major release. Not only is the cast star-studded (well...there’s a cameo by Ron Jeremy and a hall-of-fame gross-out performance by Troma regular Joe Fleishaker), but the romantic leads (Jason Yachanin and especially the radiant Kate Graham) seem like honest-to-god actors...y'know, with actual careers ahead of them. The script and direction are noticeably smarter and tighter than most past efforts, and best of all: it’s a musical, with song and dance numbers at least ten times better than Baz Luhrmann’s recent Oscar monstrosity. And why not? After all, there’s no rule that says exploitation movies have to be terrible...just as long as they’re shocking, bloody and gloriously naked.

MANIAC COP (1988)

It has an awesomely blunt, cheesy title. It was directed by Maniac’s William Lustig. And it was written by It’s Alive’s Larry Cohen. Toss in Bruce Campbell, and what you have is potential B-movie heaven. Unfortunately, Maniac Cop didn’t turn out to be the ne plus ultra of slasher flicks, but it is the type of rough-around-the-edges horror film that delivers splatter imbued with some mildly potent undercurrents. Offering up a classic return-of-the-repressed scenario, Lustig’s story concerns a detective’s (genre legend Tom Atkins) search for a homicidal cop, whose crimes have been pinned on an innocent officer (Campbell). The real culprit is a resurrected boy-in-blue who’s hell-bent on exacting revenge against the bureaucrats responsible for his death, a group of government cretins whom Cohen’s script gleefully skewers before sending to grisly deaths. Politically charged as it is, however, Maniac Cop’s critique of the powers-that-be never interferes with its low-budget thrills and kills, including a great one involving a man’s face and some wet cement.

GATOR BAIT (1974)

As the internationally renowned author of Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, it would hardly be appropriate for me to participate in an exploitation movie roundup without including a little something from the wild world of hixploitation. Since the poster for Gator Bait happens to be hanging on my living room wall mere inches from where I now sit – hick chick supreme Claudia Jennings giving me a come-hither look (or maybe that’s an I’ll-rip-your-tongue-out look) as I blog in my boxer shorts – it seems like as good a choice as any. In this “redneck romper-stomper” from Louisiana mom-and-pop team Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, Jennings and her form-fitting Daisy Dukes star as Desiree Thibodeau, a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. Desiree uses her sexual wiles and her swampy know-how, employing such tried-and-true tactics as the ol’ sack of snakes trick to pick off her toothless, inbred foes one by one. The sleaze-meter runs into the red zone early and often (Desiree’s little sister avoids being gang-raped only because the nutless hillbilly freaks out and blasts her between the legs with a shotgun), and Jennings’ Cajun accent is shaky at best, but her confident embodiment of the sexy action hero is indisputable.

B. J. LANG PRESENTS (1971)

One function of low-budget movies is to give employment to new actors on the rise or veteran performers who are down on their luck. When a good actor is practically the only thing a filmmaker has in his arsenal, you may get to see just what he can do when forced to single-handedly keep a movie on life support. But it's hard to think of another one-man show quite like this one. Also known under the title The Manipulator, it is the only film directed by one Yabo Yablinsky, and stars Mickey Rooney as a theatrical lunatic who has kidnapped a woman (Luana Anders) and spirited her to his backstage lair. Anders has practically nothing to do but whimper and stare at Rooney in disbelief, and the only other real member of the cast is Keenan Wynn, who turns up out of nowhere for no particular reason at the very end, leading the viewer to speculate that Yablinsky must have found an extra fifty dollars under the couch cushions on the last day of shooting. There's a story that Klaus Kinski was once working on a movie on which filming was stalled while the director grappled with a problem in the script, and Kinski announced, "There is no problem. I have the solution: Put the camera on me!" B. J. Lang Presents is Mickey Rooney's Klaus Kinski close-up. For an hour and a half you get to watch him race about the set, throw props around, babble endlessly to himself, babble endlessly to mannequins, talk to himself in funny voices that he thinks are the voices of the mannequins talking back, laugh maniacally, just stand there maniacally, dance and twirl a broomstick in comically speeded-up motion, dress up as Cyrano de Bergerac, and give a suspiciously convincing impersonation of a man who didn't know until this very scene that Keenan Wynn was also in this movie. At times you may wonder if Yablinsky paid Rooney for his work in this film or if Rooney paid him, but I confess to finding his go-for-broke turn fascinating, even mesmerizing, recalling in equal parts Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in The Entertainer and Jerry Lewis at the point around 4 A.M. Sunday during the Labor Day telethon when his latest infusion of caffeine kicks in just as his meds are wearing off. Every actor worth his salt ought to have one of these on his IMDB page. They'd probably sleep better for it.

DANCE HALL RACKET (1953)

This sixty-minute ball of sleaze is notable for being the closest that Lenny Bruce ever got to his lifelong dream of breaking into movies. The big studios thought the controversial comic was too hot to handle, and though he himself initiated this project and wrote the script, he apparently didn't see it as an opportunity to allay their fears by showing his warm and fuzzy side. Directed by Phil Tucker -- it was his first film, made the same year that he threw a diving helmet on a guy in a gorilla suit and called the result Robot Monster -- it's almost entirely set in and around the titular establishment, where dime-a-dance girls (one of whom is played by Lenny's stripper wife, Honey Harlowe) tend to the customers up front while all kinds of shady doings are going on in the back. (The plot involves a smuggler who's brought precious jewels into the country sewn into the ear of a puppy.) Lenny plays Vinnie, the cretinous, switchblade-flipping assistant to Timothy Farrell, a dead-faced actor with a mustache who looks like Wayne Newton gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Farrell appeared in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait and the Wood-scripted The Sinister Urge, and it would be an understatement to say that he always played the same kind of character; in fact, Dance Hall Racket was the third picture, after The Devil's Sleep and Racket Girls, in which his character was named "Umberto Scalli." Maybe he had trouble remembering that the other actors in a scene were addressing him unless they called him by a name that he had gotten used to.) In the end, Lenny is killed while the audience is still trying to digest the energetic cameo appearance by his mother, Sally Marr, and the reporter who is being told the story of the Dance Hall Racket case in the framing sequence closes his notebook with an impressed whistle. Bruce died in 1966, five years before he finally got to be associated with a good movie, when director John Magnuson used one of his greatest standup routines as the soundtrack and basis for the 1971 animated short Thank You Mask Man.

Beware Of Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

He's Burned, You'll Notice: Bruce Campbell Says He's All Evil Deaded Out

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Speaking to Damon Wise of the Guardian, Bruce Campbell has some advice for fans of the Evil Dead trilogy that made him a household name, at least in houses with a heavy geek peopulation: don't hold your breath. "I just finished a 22-city tour of the States and that question would come up all the time. I'd say, 'OK, who wanted Indiana Jones 4?' I did this at 10 different cities and maybe two hands would go up. I'd go, 'There's your answer, right there.'" Campbell, who can currently seen giving disspipation a good name on the cable TV series Burn Notice, warmed to his theme: "Harrison Ford can't even hold the whip any more! Look, if you think it through, those Evil Dead movies were very difficult to make. Every single one was a nightmare. Physically, mentally, financially - just difficult, troubled shoots. So what would make us want to go back into that world again, go through all that pain and agony as middle-aged men? The last time we made one was 18 years ago. Army Of Darkness was made 18 years ago! No one seems to do that math. Am I going to be in a wheelchair by the time we do it? My greatest fear is that we go through all that time and effort, make this part four, and people will go, 'Oh, it's OK. But it's not as good as Army Of Darkness.' Which is what will happen! It's a guarantee!"

Campbell, who seems like the kind of guy who's more likely to shrug than to trash his hotel room when he sees that Wise described him as "strangely handsome", began production on the first Evil Dead movie thirty years ago, when Campbell was twenty years old and director Sam Raimi was nineteen. Shooting would drag on for more than a year, which is a long time to spend hanging out in the woods getting drenched in karo syrup. (It wouldn't be until 1982 before the finished product starting creeping into theaters.) The two had been making little amateur movies together while in high school; from the start, their preferred specialty was slapstick comedy. When they "actually decided to make a movie for real, and we were actually taking people's money out of their pockets to do it, we knew it had to be something they could get their money back on. So we chose horror, which was a completely different genre for us. And I'm still trying to get back to where I was. I'm making horror movies that are not horror movies." The more Raimi and Campbell went back to the well with the Evil Dead sequels, the more they indulged their Three Stooges side, and the head-splitting mixture of gore and whiplash physical comedy left fans happily freaked out. That road eventually took Raimi to the promised land of the Spider-man franchise, but somewhere along the line, Campbell turned into one of those guys who plays supporting roles in big movies and starring roles in small pictures, such as the bizarre horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, in which he gave a remarkable performance as a geriatric Elvis Presley turned monster hunter. "I've had my years of getting annoyed with Evil Dead questions," Campbell says, "but now I really do realize, in retrospect, that people only ask about what they're interested in. And if they only see horror movies, they're only gonna see me in the eight or so horror movies I've done. I haven't actually done that many, less than 50%. But Evil Dead was pretty notorious and it was very popular, so it's guilt by association: I'm the horror guy. But there are people who've watched TV shows that I've done who don't even know I've been in the Evil Dead movies. If you stick around long enough you can just move on."

Campbell is in England promoting My Name Is Bruce, the comedy in which he plays a libelous version of himself who is obliged to do real-life battle with a Chinese war god. (The movie was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. last week.) A BBC interviewer actually compared the film to JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme's recent visit to a metatextual reality, and while the connection may strike Campbell fans as a little off the wall--Campbell has been parodying himself so enthusiastically and for so long that he's practically the pre-AARP version of Leslie Nielson--it is fun just to see these two guys mentioned in the same sentence. Although the project didn't originate wirth Campbell, he embraced it with sufficient enthusiasm that he poured his own money into it and even opened up his own property to serve as a back lot. "Any time you make a movie that's under $200 million, you're going to put some of your own money into it. It got to a point where the composer would say, 'Y'know Bruce, let's get some real strings here because it'll sound great'. And I'd be like, 'Really, do we really need them... well [mimes signing a check]...okay'."

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Ride Hard

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of his career, Sam Raimi has been a hero to genre lovers everywhere. It was his debut feature The Evil Dead that first brought Raimi to the attention of gorehounds, and his subsequent films further endeared him to his fans. With their outrageous camera movements, “splat-stick” comic violence, and the larger-than-life presence of Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead trilogy gained Raimi a rabid cult following. However, he soon found himself confined in the horror genre. At first, he attempted to transfer his trademark style to other genres- crime story, comic book movie, Western- with varying degrees of success.

Finally, with 1998’s A Simple Plan, Raimi decided to keep his more gonzo impulses in check, and in doing so created his first “mature” work, and his most critically-acclaimed film to date. Having finally tasted mainstream acceptance, Raimi craved more, and decided to make a real stab at Hollywood respectability with his next project, an adaptation of Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game. After all, what’s more mainstream than a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner? Unfortunately for Raimi, For Love of the Game turned out to be his worst- and not coincidentally, his least Raimi-esque- film to date.

For about half its running time, the film is a decent, fairly entertaining baseball movie. Its hero, Billy Chapel (played by Costner), is a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher who suddenly finds himself throwing a perfect game in what may be the last start of his career. It’s been said that a perfect game is both the rarest and the most boring achievement in baseball, but Raimi keeps us involved by concentrating on Chapel- not only his actions and dialogue but also the thoughts that occur to him while he’s on the mound. It’s a neat touch whenever Chapel tunes out the hostile Yankee Stadium crowd with the mantra, “clear the mechanism.” By the time the game reaches its last few innings, we can more or less predict what the outcome will be, but Raimi has nonetheless done a pretty good job getting us to root for Chapel to finish the perfect game.

However, For Love of the Game isn’t content simply to be a baseball movie, and almost none of the scenes that take place off the baseball field are any good. Faring worst is the movie’s principal non-baseball storyline, which traces the trajectory of a relationship between Chapel and New York single mother Jane, played by Kelly Preston. Despite taking up nearly half the movie, the relationship between the two is ill-defined. As a result, there’s a highlight-reel to the storyline, amounting to little more than a series of flirtations, breakups, reconciliations, as well as a whole lot of grief from Jane.

A big part of the problem in these scenes is Preston’s performance. Preston, never a particularly good actress, is out of her element as a leading lady. Clearly overmatched and nervous opposite Costner (who’s pretty good here), she gives an overly fussy performance that seesaws constantly between the two notes she knows how to play- beaming and neurotic. Consequently, Jane comes off more as a pill than as the complicated, conflicted adult she’s meant to be.

It would be one thing if the film realized or even acknowledged what a prickly character Jane is, but instead it paints her as the foundation in Billy’s emotional life. Throughout his perfect game, Billy flashes back to his life with Jane- who just left him that morning- and it’s clear that we’re meant to care about whether these two lovers end up together in the end. Instead, all I wanted to do was to keep watching the game. After all, everyone falls in love sooner or later, but only seventeen major league pitchers have ever pitched a perfect game. Talk about burying the lead.

After For Love of the Game met with a critical drubbing and large-scale audience indifference, Raimi decided it was time to re-examine his career path again. First he rebounded with the flawed but interesting Southern Gothic thriller The Gift, after which he made his most popular films to date, the Spider-Man trilogy. With the Spider-Man films, Raimi finally found mainstream success without sacrificing any of his inimitable style, which helped all three of the Spidey films become the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. And all of them- yes, even the third one- were better than For Love of the Game.

Trailer Review: My Name Is Bruce

John Constantine — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:10:00 GMT

Good ol’ Bruce Campbell. Yeah, the guy’s considered a reigning deity in the nerd pantheon, but even beyond the cult-of-personality and the cult films, he’s just such a loveable performer. You know an actor’s special when he can make Old Spice commercials entertaining. That said, this trailer for My Name Is Bruce is only half-promising. A slice of self-parody that looks like a bit much even for Brisco County, Jr., it’s about Bruce Campbell fanboys who call up Bruce Campbell to defeat an ancient evil that’s terrorizing their backwater town. It might be too one-note for a feature length but if anyone can make it work, it’s the man himself.

For all you ‘Grabbers, see if you can place all the different movie scores that have been co-opted and used in this trailer.

Morning Deal Report: Tell Me Bruce Campbell's In It

Peter Smith — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi returns to his roots, with a movie called Drag Me to Hell, cowritten with his brother Ivan. Now that is awesome. Key quote: "The appeal to Sam. . . was returning to what he had once done and loved doing, which was entertaining a very specific group of fans and providing a roller coaster ride for them." I think I hear a very specific group of fans salivating already.

Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah and Sophie Okonedo have joined Fox Searchlight's adaptation of the bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. Improbably, it's about "an eccentric trio of beekeeping sisters," not a quirky regional spelling competition. Dakota Fanning may also be involved.

Here come the big guns: now the Vatican itself has spoken out against The Golden Compass, instead of just letting William Donahue sputter about it on Fox News. Guys, chill — it's not even that good.