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.
Jungle adventure, Madonna, Clint Eastwood on a mission, and lonely horror.
LUANA (1968)
Like many Italian productions, director Roberto Infascelli's Luana (which he directed under the name Bob Raymond) has multiple titles to choose from. You can call it Luana, or The Jungle Girl Luana. The "sex sells" approach brought about the title Luana: Virgin of the Forest. And there's the one that sounds the most adventurous: Luana, the Girl Tarzan. The simple Luana probably matches the movie best, because it's family friendly and quite bland.
Scripted by Louis Road, the film centers on Evi Marandi as a young woman named Isabel. Years earlier, her father's plane crashed in the jungle with him, her Asian Princess stepmother, and her little half-sister on board. Now Isabel has assembled a team to search the jungle with her in hopes of finding her family's remains. Aside from a gratuitous arm wrestling match where the loser is threatened with a scorpion sting and a moment involving a man-eating plant, there's not much excitement to this expedition - but the audience has information that most of the characters do not. Isabel's sister survived the plane crash and has been living in the jungle for years with no company but a chimpanzee. She is the jungle girl Luana, played by Mei Chen... and pretty much all Luana does is hang out in the jungle and watch Isabel and her team walk around. Audience members drawn in by that Virgin of the Forest title probably appreciated the fact that Luana wears a skimpy loincloth, but were disappointed that her long hair never stops hanging over her breasts. This was clearly made with young viewers in mind.
Kids in 1968 might have liked it, but it hasn't aged well. It's not bad, just rather lifeless.
The most interesting thing about Luana is the story of Alan Dean Foster being hired to write a novelization when the film secured U.S. distribution. The script was in Italian, so Foster couldn't work from that, and when the movie was screened for him it was also in Italian, without English subtitles. Since Foster couldn't decipher the story Infascelli and Road told, he just looked at the very cool poster art created by Frank Frazetta and let his imagination run wild.
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985)
Susan (Madonna) and Jim (Robert Joy, in what feels like a rare "normal person" role) have a very odd open relationship. He travels the country with his band, she appears to roam the country hooking up with and stealing from random guys. When Jim can't stand being apart from Susan any longer, he puts an ad in the personals section of a tabloid that say he's "Desperately Seeking Susan" and tells her where to meet up with him. Their long-awaited meetings won't even necessarily have any substance to them; when Susan and Jim meet up in New York City near the beginning of the film Desperately Seeking Susan, they barely have time to talk before he has to rush off with his band.
Susan and Jim don't realize they have a fan - New Jersey housewife Roberta Glass (Rosanna Arquette), who is so captivated by their tabloid ad love story that she goes to their designated meeting spot so she can spy on them. She ends up following Susan after the meeting and buying a jacket she sells at a thrift shop... and finding a locker key in one of the jacket's pockets. Unfortunately for Roberta, included among Susan's stuff in the locker are earrings she stole from an Atlantic City mobster right before he got whacked. The hitman who killed the mobster wants those earrings. So when Roberta sets up a personal ad meeting hoping to give the locker key back to Susan, the hitman, played by Will Patton, is there to greet her before Susan arrives. In the ensuing tussle, Roberta hits her head. When she wakes up, she has amnesia. And she's being cared for by Jim's pal Dez (Aidan Quinn), who Jim sent to the meeting location when he saw Roberta's ad, knowing something strange was going on. Dez thinks Roberta is Susan, so Roberta comes to think that for a while, too.
Although Dez thinks Roberta is basically his friend's girlfriend, a romance blooms between them - which would make the audience uneasy, despite the fact that she has amnesia, if we hadn't seen how bland her home life with her hot tub salesman husband Gary Glass (Mark Blum) is. There's such an absence of affection between them, my brain got scrambled during a recent viewing and I spent a portion of the movie thinking they were siblings. We also have information Roberta doesn't: Gary is cheating on her. So sure, she can go for Dez and the viewer can feel just fine about it.
Directed by Susan Seidelman from a screenplay by Leora Barish, Desperately Seeking Susan is an odd movie when you break down the plot (and I didn't even mention the part where Roberta gets a job as a magician's assistant at a club run by John Turturro), but Arquette does a good job in the lead role and it has the curiosity factor of featuring Madonna at a time when she had just become one of the biggest stars in the world, so it's worth checking out. It's a romantic comedy at its core and was clearly palatable for a wide audience, since it was a hit in '85, but it's also surprisingly weird. The '80s. What a decade.
WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968)
The World War II "men on a mission" movie Where Eagles Dare exists entirely because of Richard Burton's legendary relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. Hoping to appease Taylor's children, he asked a producer to find him a project that would allow him to do "some superhero stuff" and play a character who survives the film. Apparently Taylor's children were tired of seeing him die so often in movies. The producer turned to author Alistair MacLean, who was known for writing thrillers and adventure stories that were getting a lot of attention from studios at the time, and asked him to come up with something. And that's how we got Where Eagles Dare, directed by Brian G. Hutton from a screenplay by MacLean.
Burton plays Major John Smith, who has accomplished some amazing things during his time in the British military. He's considered their best, and it's said that he doesn't just have a sixth sense that helps him get through dangerous situations. "He has a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth." This time he has been tasked with leading a team of commandos on a raid of a castle in the German Alps, where a U.S. Army Brigadier General who plays a major role in planning the war efforts is being held captive by German forces. Since the objective is to rescue an American, there's an American on Smith's team as well: Clint Eastwood as Lieutenant Morris Schaffer. Eastwood's agent recommend that he take the role because he thought it would be interesting to see Eastwood share the screen with "someone with seniority". Which I guess meant someone who had a high profile career in this case, because Burton didn't have many years on Eastwood. He was also the same age as Lee Van Cleef, who Eastwood had just done For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with, and he had less credits than Van Cleef. But he was certainly in the spotlight more. Eastwood wasn't a fan of the script and gave most of his lines to Burton so he could play the quiet man of action.
Where Eagles Dare is an icy cold movie, and not just because it's set in the snowbound Alps. Although there are interesting things going on throughout, these things are presented in such a way that it felt to me like the movie was progressing at a glacial pace for the first hour or so. At 155 minutes, it is way too long for the amount of substance contained within those minutes; it would have been much more enjoyable if it were 30 minutes or so shorter. That said, it does tell a good story if you can keep your attention on it despite the early stretch, and it also rewards you with some solid action sequences. Burton gets to kill enemies and survive the bloated running time, just like Taylor's kids were wanting to see, and Eastwood is right there with him, racking up an impressive body count himself.
The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
ALONE WITH YOU (2021)
By now we’ve seen multiple movies that were made in the COVID age where people are shown staying at home and interacting with each other through computer and/or phone screens, and some of them have been quite good. And yet when you hear that Alone With You is a COVID-era movie set almost entirely in one location, centering on one character who has an occasional interaction with others through their computer and phone, you might brace yourself to see something that’s going to be lacking in some way, like maybe the low budget is going to be extremely apparent in the picture quality. But that is not the case. Although Alone With You marks the feature directorial debut of Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, they both already have several years of credits to their names, Bennett as an actor and director of shorts, Brooks as a director of shorts and a cinematographer (among other credits). They have experience, and they used the knowledge they gained over the years to make an incredibly well-crafted film that looks great, even while showing us little more than one person in one location.
Bennett stars as that one person, Charlie, who is sitting at home alone in her apartment, waiting for her girlfriend Simone (Emma Myles) to get home from a business trip. It’s a special night, Charlie and Simone’s anniversary, and Charlie is looking forward to celebrating. Simone’s flight landed on time, she should be arriving any minute… But she doesn’t, and Charlie can’t reach her on the phone. The longer Simone stays out of contact, the more paranoid Charlie gets – and with reason, because flashbacks show us that this isn’t exactly the most pleasant relationship.
Romantic woes aren’t the only issue Charlie has to deal with here, otherwise the movie probably wouldn’t be categorized as horror. The more time she spends alone in the apartment, the stranger things get. It appears to be night outside the apartment windows, and yet it’s only supposed to be around two in the afternoon. None of the clocks around Charlie are working, so she can’t confirm the time for herself. The door to the apartment is jammed, so she can’t step outside. People she calls and texts for help aren’t helpful. There are odd noises from next door. And is there someone else moving around inside the apartment?
Myles is the only actor we see Bennett with in person, but she does contact a couple genre regulars through her devices. Dora Madison is Charlie’s friend Thea, who talks to her through a few video calls, dissing Simone and getting wasted at a bar even though it’s supposedly only 2pm. The iconic Barbara Crampton plays Charlie’s disapproving mother, performing her part in front of a webcam and upsetting our lead. Crampton’s presence is a major selling point for the film, but you shouldn’t expect to see very much of her in here. She’s only around for a few minutes.
It’s nice to see the other actors in their brief appearances, but Bennett really carries the entire movie on her shoulders and does a terrific job of it. She gave herself a very challenging role, she has to play some intense moments as it becomes clear that there’s something supernatural or psychological going on here, and she was up for the challenge. If you haven’t been aware of her acting career up to this point, she definitely establishes herself as an actor to keep an eye on. Alone With You also establishes that Bennett and Brooks are filmmakers to keep an eye on; if they can put together something so well-made with these limitations, it will be interesting to see what they can do in the future.
Even with other actors stopping by here and there, it can get kind of tiring watching one person freak out in one location for the length of a feature, so it is a relief that Bennett and Brooks made sure their movie doesn’t overstay its welcome. It has a running time of just 82 minutes, and that’s counting a few minutes of end credits – a perfect running time for something like this. The movie gives you an intriguingly strange story to watch out play out for a little over an hour, allows you to marvel at the lead’s acting performance, and then leaves you with troubling thoughts.
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