Modeling, slashing, aerobics, and the apocalypse.
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)
On April 14, 2006, three movies were released that I wanted to see, but the closest theatre showing two of them was a 90 minute drive away. For two weeks, that same theatre had already been showing a fourth movie that I wanted to see. So somehow I convinced my mom to go to that theatre with me two days in a row and have double features on both days. The first day started with the movie that had been released on March 31st, Rian Johnson's Brick (the widest release that film ever got was 45 screens), and we followed it up with Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page (widest release: 73 screens). The next day we were back to see Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking (that one actually got a pretty big release, over 1000 screens) and David Slade's Hard Candy (which only made it to 152 screens). It's amazing to me now that we did that, packing around three hours of movies between three total hours of driving on back-to-back days, but that's how it went. Good times.
Written by Harron and Guinevere Turner, The Notorious Bettie Page is a biopic about 1950s pinup model Bettie Page, who gained an enduring popularity and a level of notoriety for posing nude and appealing to fans of bondage. Played by Gretchen Mol, the model comes off more like "the adorable Bettie Page" in this movie as she glides through her career with a pleasant attitude and cute expressions.
The film does go into dark moments in Bettie's life. She was molested as a child in Nashville, she was raped not long after she left home. These facts are laid out for the viewer, but they're not used as an explanation for Bettie's later career. Harron and Turner never dig all that deep into what made Bettie tick, and the character never gets introspective. We see that she always liked posing for pictures, and she just has fun modeling. When photographers bring up the idea of doing some bondage shots she goes along with it, and afterward just comments, "That was different."
Sometimes Bettie gets nervous, but she moves through it and has fun with the pictures. Her nerves really get the best of her when she's pursuing an acting career. Her attempts to get into that side of the business never panned out for her.
Of course, there was a lot of outrage over the sort of pictures Bettie posed for back then, and the matter ended up being debated in a Senate hearing - described as a "smut probe" - presided over by Senator Estes Kefauver (played by David Strathairn in the film), a man who had recently missed his chance to be Vice President when he and his running mate Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon by an electoral landslide in the 1952 election.
The Notorious Bettie Page was primarily shot in black & white and it looks great, popping into a beautiful, old fashioned color whenever Bettie takes a trip to Miami, much like the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz gains color when Dorothy is in Oz.
This isn't a deep, dramatic movie like so many other biopics are. Aside from the glimpses we get of the horrible things Bettie had to endure in her youth, it's a very breezy, easy watch. It's good, and I enjoyed seeing it on the big screen thirteen years ago.
KILLER WORKOUT (1987)
Writer/director David A. Prior's horror film Killer Workout (a.k.a. Aerobi-Cide) is one of the most filler-packed movies you could find, but depending on your proclivities you might not mind the amount of filler at all. That's because the 85 minute running time is padded out with lengthy sequences showing us aerobics class at a gym called Rhonda's Work-Out, complete with extras looking directly into the camera and smiling.
The story connecting those sequences is a slasher murder mystery that begins when a model named Valerie is horribly burned in a freak tanning bed accident. Then someone starts whittling down the number of members at Rhonda's Work-Out, killing people with a large safety pin, which seems like one of the worst possible choices for a signature weapon. Maybe that's why the slasher starts switching up their weapons more as the films go on.
We won't be told who the slasher is until the end of the film. Until then we follow several characters to see how they handle the situation (and conduct personal affairs), like Rhonda herself (Marcia Karr); Detective Lieutenant Morgan (David James Campbell), the cop on the case; Rhonda's Work-Out regulars and employees / potential victims and suspects; and mysterious new hire Chuck Dawson, who wears ridiculously short shorts, ends up in bed with one of the aerobics girls within minutes of showing up at the gym, and is played by Prior's bodybuilder brother Ted Prior. Ted starred in a lot of his brother's many films, often as the action hero.
This slasher does feature some more action movie type of scenes than you would typically expect from something like this, as Chuck gets an extended fist fight and Morgan has a chase with a gun-wielding suspect. That's another unique element of this movie beyond all the exercise.
Killer Workout is a "so bad it's good" movie, the kind you can put on and laugh at with friends while being amazed at how much aerobics footage Prior chose to pack into the movie - something I can appreciate, because I'm entertained by that sort of low budget exploitation movie filmmaking. The decision to put in that much aerobics might have been the best one Prior made while putting Killer Workout together, as the writing is absurd, the acting questionable, and many moments and sights are unintentionally amusing.
If you like "bad movies" like I do, Killer Workout is a winner.
US (2019)
It was quite surprising when Jordan Peele, a performer known entirely for comedy up to that point, revealed that his feature directorial debut was going to be a horror movie. It was even more surprising when that horrific debut, Get Out, turned out to be so well crafted that Peele won an Oscar for writing the screenplay. It's very rare that the Academy gives the horror genre any attention at all - and of course since Get Out was so well received there were members of the audience who tried to say it wasn't even a horror movie, as if saying it was a different genre made their enjoyment of it more acceptable.
So with his second film, Peele decided to make something that no one could deny was a horror movie. And while Us is still extremely well made and prestigious - you're not aiming low when you get Lupita Nyong'o and Elisabeth Moss in your cast - it does feel much more like a run-of-the-mill horror movie than Get Out did. This is basically Peele's mash-up of concepts from zombie outbreak films, slashers, and home invasion movies, and after all hell breaks loose about 35 minutes in the majority of the running time just consists of characters running and fighting for their lives.
Nyong'o and her Black Panther co-star Winston Duke play married couple Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, who have brought their two young kids to the Santa Cruz vacation home that Adelaide has been coming to ever since she was a child. She's fine with going to the vacation home, but she's not so fond of the nearby Santa Cruz boardwalk, where she had a traumatizing experience in a hall of mirrors back in 1986. One of the reflections in that hall of mirrors didn't seem to be a reflection at all. It seemed to be a separate version of Adelaide, and she still feels that creepy "mirror girl" is coming to get her.
And she's right. When a family of four appears in their driveway wearing red jumpsuits and wielding scissors, the Wilsons quickly realize that these people are their own doppelgängers. These are people Peele refers to as "the Tethered", and it seems that everyone in the continental United States has one of these strange doubles. The Tethered have been living in the thousands of miles of abandoned tunnels beneath the U.S., acting as our shadows, living out twisted versions of the lives of their doubles on the surface. But they're not staying down there anymore. They're rising to the surface to kill off their doubles and let their presence be known by recreating an event that was going on back in 1986: the Hands Across America human chain.
There are a lot of chase scenes and acts of violence in Us, interspersed with moments of levity, but what sticks with me the most are the performances from Nyong'o. Not only does she get to play the horrified mom who finds the inner strength to overcome these enemies with the Adelaide role, but she also gets to play Adelaide's odd, creepy double Red, who also happens to be the only member of the Tethered who can speak, although her voice is quite unique. Nyong'o does an excellent job delivering her lines in that voice, and in making Red a villain we can feel sympathy for. Her life underground has been hellish, so it's fully understandable why she's leading this revolt.
Eventually, Adelaide and Red have a climactic showdown that was my favorite part of the entire movie.
I don't see Us getting the awards recognition Get Out did (unless groups do see fit to celebrate what Nyong'o did here), but it's a solid horror film. Some facts about the Tethered were a bit tough to swallow, but I can set aside nitpicks about the logic of it all.
PHOENIX THE WARRIOR (1988)
The "sword and sorcery" genre got mashed up with the post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior cash-in" style for director Robert Hayes' film Phoenix the Warrior, which stars Halloween 4's Kathleen Kinmont as the gun-toting, sword-wielding title character (unless you're watching a copy of the film that has the cooler alternate title She-Wolves of the Wasteland).
The world has been turned into a desolate wasteland by the bacteriological wars that left only a handful of women alive. Through the desert countryside moves Phoenix, a "sand trapper" who is the sort of badass who can toss an apple up in the air and shoot two enemies dead before catching the apple on its way down. During her travels, Phoenix encounters a woman named Keela (Peggy Sands), who is being pursued by a villainous group headed up by Cobalt (Persis Khambatta), right hand woman to Reverend Mother (Sheila Howard), the ruler of the wasteland who has anyone who opposes her hunted down and killed. Reverend Mother has been using her "dark powers" to breed a new race of woman, but now there has been a new twist in the process. Keela, who has never seen a man in her life, has escaped from Reverend Mother's breeding facility after being impregnated with a male child.
Phoenix takes Keela under her wing, protecting her from Cobalt, keeping her hidden as she gives birth to a son she names Skyler (Skyler Corbett). Things go smoothly for five years, but then Cobalt and her lackeys are once again ripping after them in their dune buggies and go-karts. Soon Phoenix is the one who needs some help, as she gets captured by Cobalt and forced to compete in gladiator fights - they say these fights occur in the "gladiator pits", but it's really just a flat patch of ground inside an enclosure made with a pile of rocks and a poorly constructed fence. The film then briefly becomes a precursor of sorts to Thor: Ragnarok, but instead of Thor having a gladiator fight with the Hulk we get Phoenix fighting characters like a woman who wears an outfit so skimpy her nipples are only covered with pasties.
While Phoenix is fighting for her life, Keela is conducting a rescue mission, teaming up with a character she is shocked to meet: Guy (James H. Emery), a grown man who has escaped from Reverend Mother's seed tanks. When Phoenix meets him, she's very excited by the idea of getting to experience penis. She doesn't say it that way, but she should have.
Of course, the story can't just end with Phoenix getting away from the "gladiator pits". This story can't be over until our heroines directly confront Reverend Mother, and they can't do that until after they have encountered a group of hideous mutants that are obsessed with classic television shows and believe people actually traveled from "telebox to telebox" to bring these shows to screens.
Written by Hayes and Dan Rotblatt, Phoenix/She-Wolves is a fun and ridiculous dirt cheap B-movie that gives you strong female characters while also making sure they are wearing as little clothing as possible. I've been a fan of Kinmont ever since watching Halloween 4 as a young kid, so it was cool to see her in a role like this, which is as different from her Halloween 4 role as you can get. Apparently this was released on home video just 10 days after Halloween 4 arrived in theatres, so that was quite a time for Kinmont... Unfortunately it took me a few decades to catch up on this one. Here she got to act tough while blasting and beating down multiple challengers, and while those action scenes aren't exactly impressive or expertly put together, that's part of the movie's low rent charm.
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