Worth Mentioning - Are There Any Dam Questions?

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Griswolds, Scanners, and erotic thrills.

VEGAS VACATION (1997)

Seven years and a couple months after I was able to see Christmas Vacation in the theatre, the Griswold family returned to the big screen in Vegas Vacation - and I was back at the theatre to see them on opening weekend. Unlike when I went to Christmas Vacation, I didn't see a timeless classic when I went to Vegas Vacation. Although some would say it's bad, I wouldn't go that far. This is just what I would call a "nice" movie. It's not particularly good, not especially funny, but it was nice to spend time with the Griswolds again. 

For the first time in the series, John Hughes didn't receive a writing credit on this movie; in fact, he wasn't involved with the making of it at all. (Hughes also said he didn't write European Vacation, despite receiving a screenwriting credit on that one.) Instead, veteran editor Bob Ducsay earned his sole writing credit here, credited for crafting the story with TV veteran Elisa Bell. Their story was then brought to the screen by Stephen Kessler, making his feature directorial debut... and except for a low budget comedy released three years later, Kessler has never directed another narrative feature.

The film begins with Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) announcing to his wife Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) and their two children that he has been given a bonus at work and he's going to use the money to take them to Las Vegas, where he and Ellen will renew their wedding vows for their 20th anniversary. 20th anniversary? Fourteen years after the first Vacation, Clark and Ellen have only been married twenty years? Continuity is not this franchise's strong suit, because the Griswold kids Rusty and Audrey are somehow still teenagers, now played by Ethan Embry and Marisol Nichols. It's kind of ridiculous that the filmmakers insisted on keeping Rusty and Audrey kids for so long, but the fact that they're underage in Las Vegas does become an important part of the story.

Nothing goes as planned in Vegas, of course. Clark becomes addicted to gambling, playing blackjack against a smug dealer played by Wallace Shawn. Wayne Newton (as himself) tries to woo Ellen away from her husband. Rusty scores a fake ID and becomes a high roller. And just like in the first movie, Audrey falls under the bad influence of her cousin Vicki (Shae D'lyn), a pole dancer with horrible dance moves.

Vicki's here, so her father Eddie (Randy Quaid) isn't far behind. Quaid had been such a memorable and beloved part of Christmas Vacation, isn't no surprise they decided to give him a prominent role in the follow-up. As it turns out, Eddie lives in the Vegas area now and Clark was apparently unaware of this fact. You only have to wait about 15 minutes for Eddie to make his entrance, and he's around quite a lot for the remaining 79 minutes. Nothing he does matches up to the brilliance of his role in Christmas Vacation, but he's still amusing.

Surprisingly, given the setting, Clark's wandering eye is only briefly in play; he's reasonably well behaved in Vegas. There is a scene where he crosses paths with Christie Brinkley, reprising the role of the woman he drooled over in the first movie... but his passion for appears to be extinguished when he sees that she has a baby now. I guess since an important part of the movie involves Wayne Newton trying to steal Ellen, they couldn't have Clark drooling over other women too much, otherwise the viewer would start rooting for Newton.

There's really not a whole lot to Vegas Vacation except for the character plots already mentioned. There's a Siegfried and Roy appearance, there's an attempt at a standout comedic sequence set at the Hoover Dam that doesn't really work, there's a great cameo from Sid Caesar. Then the movie lets you get on your way. Thanks for the visit, Griswolds. It was good to see you again.

SCANNERS III: THE TAKEOVER (1991)

Filmed back-to-back with Scanners II: The New Order, Scanners III: The Takeover kept Christian Duguay at the helm, again working from a screenplay by B.J. Nelson - but this time Nelson shares the writing credit with Julie Richard, David Preston, and producer Rene Malo. The story begins with Alex Monet (Steve Parrish) attempting to show off his "scanning" abilities - the telekinetic and telepathic abilities the previous films have told us were caused by a pregnancy drug called Ephemerol in the 1940s and are now being passed down through the generations - at a Christmas party. This ill-advised session of show and tell results in a tragic accident, so Alex flees to a monastery in Thailand where he hopes to gain full control of his powers.

Unfortunately, while Alex is away his adoptive sister Helena (Duguay's wife Liliana Komorowska) begins to experience intense migraines and nightmares about the experiments that were conducted on her in a scanners institution before she and Alex were adopted by the Monet family, and her scanning ability gets out of hand. In an attempt to get this under control, she uses an experimental new Ephemerol patch. With this heavy dose of the drug pumping through her, she immediately becomes the film's villain. She kills multiple people, including making a person's head explode, because every Scanners movie has to have an exploding head. She frees the scanners from that institute and starts building her own little army.

So of course it's up to Alex to come back home and stop Helena. It's a simple, standard little action story, I'm not sure why it took four people to put the script together. Scanners III is so simple and moves along so quickly that it turned out to be my favorite of this inital trilogy of Scanners movies... which some might think is ridiculous, since David Cronenberg's original is considered a classic, but it is a classic that can feel quite slow and I had trouble sitting through it at first. I didn't have that issue with The Takeover, which is kind of a goofy movie - the sort of movie where people have a conversation near a kickboxing match so we can cut away to shots of fighters during the chat. Then a scanner takes control of one of the fighters, things go way out of control, and the sequence ends with an explosion. That's a good time right there. This was the cheap '90s action movie take on Scanners, and I was all for it.

I also enjoyed watching Komorowska chew the scenery as the villainous Helena for the majority of the movie. I have to imagine she and Duguay must have had a whole lot of fun working on this together, putting this kind of movie out into the world as a couple.

NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS (1995)

Peter Hall was a highly respected director of stage plays and operas, and was even referred to as "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century". And to the world of cinema he contributed the erotic thriller Never Talk to Strangers, a movie I remember enthusiastically renting when I was an adolescent and then being disappointed that it didn't have enough sex scenes. Over the next twenty-five years, the only thing I remembered about this movie was that a character played by Antonio Banderas had a strange apartment that included lockers and a caged-in area, and that he and Rebecca De Mornay have a sex scene up against that cage that involved either Banderas biting her butt or De Mornay biting his butt.

When I watched Never Talk to Strangers again, I found that De Mornay bites Banderas's butt. Big bites. Three times. She was committed to that scene.

Written by Lewis Green and Jordan Rush, the film tells the story of criminal psychologist Sarah Taylor (De Mornay), who is conducting interviews with an accused serial killer Max Cheski (Harry Dean Stanton) who is attempting to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he has multiple personality disorder. Between sessions with Cheski, Sarah strikes up a relationship with Banderas's Tony Ramirez... and then things get very unnerving, as Sarah has a stalker who puts her obituary in the newspaper and kills her cat. She suspects Tony so strongly that she even hires a private investigator to follow him. But another potential candidate is her neighbor Cliff Raddison (Dennis Miller), who has been unsuccessfully pursuing a relationship with Sarah even though she's only interested in being friends. He's quite persistent, and when Cliff delivers lines line "I'm Sisyphus with a hard-on", it's clear that Miller was allowed to ad lib.

The sparse sex scenes didn't disappoint me as much at 37 as they did when I was 12, so this time around I actually found Never Talk to Strangers to be an interesting, entertaining movie to sit through. It's nothing special, but it only takes up 86 minutes of your time and has some nice twists and turns. I won't be going back to it regularly, but I'm glad I watched it again all these years later.