Worth Mentioning - Everybody's Got a Right to Be a Sucker Once

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. 

Clint Eastwood, weird horror, and erotic thrills with Madonna.

TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA (1970) 

There are some movies that I associate with the people I saw enjoying them at a time when I wasn't impressed by them. For example, I think of Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile as "friends' mom" movies, because my friends' mom was a fan of them and it took me years to be able to get into them. And there's Two Mules for Sister Sara, which I think of as a grandma movie because I remember my grandma watching it on TV and at that time I was not interested in the movie at all. So even when I watch Two Mules for Sister Sara now I still consider it a "grandma movie", despite it being a Clint Eastwood Western with an Ennio Morricone score. It's not as cool as the Man with No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). It's a Clint Eastwood Western for grandmas to watch.

That mental oddness aside, I do enjoy Two Mules for Sister Sara more now than I did as a child, and it is nice to see Eastwood back in a Western after he did some branching out with Coogan's Bluff, Where Eagles Dare, Paint Your Wagon, and Kelly's Heroes. He first saw the script for this movie while he was working on Where Eagles Dare with Richard Burton, as Burton's wife Elizabeth Taylor had it with her. She was planning to play the Sister Sara character. But plans changed, and Eastwood ended up starring in the film with Shirley MacLaine. The movie reunited Eastwood with Coogan's Bluff director (and future Dirty Harry director) Don Siegel. That was a result of a change in plan as well. Budd Boetticher had written the first draft of the script with the intention of directing the movie himself, and he wanted the film to star Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, a Western reunion thirteen years after they made the World War II movie Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison together. He would have even had Kerr playing a nun again. But the project drifted out of Boetticher's hands, it was rewritten by Albert Maltz, and Boetticher was not a fan of the movie Siegel made with Eastwood and MacLaine.

Set in the 1860s, the film begins with Eastwood's character, Civil War veteran Hogan, saving MacLaine's Sara from a group of bandits in the Mexican desert - and then being shocked to discover that the woman he just saved is a nun. Hogan and Sara are both mixed up in the Mexican revolutionaries' fight against the invading forces of the Second French Empire, so they end up going on a long journey together. And most of the movie consists of interactions between this rough-edged mercenary and the nun - with moments of the man of action being surprised that Sister Sara will occasionally drink alcohol or swear. This is prime grandma movie material, but still fun to watch even if you're not a grandma. Action breaks out from time to time; a bunch of people do get shot in this movie, and there's an awesome climactic battle that's packed with explosions. Along with a machete to the face that would make Tom Savini proud. There's also a bloody scene of Hogan having an arrow stuck in his shoulder. These are less grandma-friendly moments. At least this is one of those movies where the blood looks like thick red paint, so it's less disturbing to see.

Despite what Boetticher and my younger self thought, Two Mules for Sister Sara is quite a good movie. I really wish I could watch it with my grandma now. We'd both enjoy it.

THE INSTITUTE (2022)

When I watch the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby, the parts that creep me out the most aren’t the ones involving Satan or the Antichrist. They’re the ones that focus on Rosemary consuming the mysterious tannis root and experiencing severe stomach pains during her pregnancy. I have a feeling that Hamza Zaman was similarly disturbed by those moments in Rosemary’s Baby, because his feature writing and directing debut The Institute is basically a play on that same idea.

Ignacyo Matynia and Victorya Brandart star in The Institute as a young couple named Danny and Marie, which is close enough to Donny and Marie that I couldn’t help but think about “A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock ‘N Roll” whenever someone referred to them as “Danny and Marie”. They were all set to have a child, but the pregnancy ended in tragedy that left Marie unable to conceive again. So they seek help from fertility specialist Doctor Arthur Lands (Mark Lobene), who has set up the Lands Institute of Reproductive Science in a very secluded area. This place is not only a “world classic clinic” and “holistic wellness center”, but also a wilderness sanctuary.

At the titular institute, Danny and Marie are treated alongside two other couples; Jarred Harper and Louisa Bradshaw as Steve and Mel, and Claire McClain and Joy Donze as Izzy and Blu. They’re put through a series of tests and provided with a constant stream of blended drinks; Brazilian restoratives, cocktails of herbs and roots. This has the pleasant side effect of intense horniness and heightened sexual sensations, leading to some scenes reminiscent of something you might catch on Cinemax late at night. Including an orgy. But Danny sees through the good times and knows there’s something off about Lands and his treatments.

This is a horror movie, so of course Lands is up to something sinister. But toward the end of the film, there were some twists and turns that I did not see coming, which was appreciated. That definitely gave my enjoyment of the film a boost.

The Institute is a weird movie. The idea at the core of the story, which was basically lifted from Rosemary’s Baby, is very interesting. A couple being treated at a sinister fertility clinic is a great concept for a horror movie, and the story is intriguing for the most part. The movie held my attention throughout. But this flick also gets extremely goofy at times. There are scenes where viewers are sure to be laughing at The Institute rather than going along with it. The very last shot of the movie is going to have people laughing at how terrible and silly something looks, and that’s not the best note to end on for a movie that wasn’t intended to be a comedy.

But maybe it’s fitting, because the very first scene of The Institute also features some special effects that look so bad, some viewers will be asking, “What did I just get myself into?” Thankfully, the movie isn’t packed with poor effects, but they do pop up here and there. There are bad CGI effects, and there are unconvincing green screen effects – first to provide the background during a car ride, and later even inside the Lands Institute, where it appears that the laboratory set didn’t actually exist.

Zaman clearly had a small budget to work with, and I commend him for doing what it took to bring his story to the screen. The set-up is ideal for a low budget first feature, as the movie just focuses on a small amount of characters in one location for most of the running time. But some of these things were too ambitious, and the effects used to bring them to life didn’t work very well.

The Institute doesn’t quite work as a whole. It’s not terrible, it’s worth a watch if you’re ready to forgive some shoddy effects and see an engaging idea get fumbled. But if you have no time for near misses and only want to watch something that’s really good, this is not what the doctor ordered.

The review of The Institute originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

BODY OF EVIDENCE (1993)

I don't think I'm being rude to say that actor Willem Dafoe is generally seen as having a rather creepy and unnerving screen presence. The fact that he has played all sorts of weird and villainous characters during his career is proof of that. The guy is the Green Goblin, and there were complaints when he wore a helmet as the Goblin because his features were already naturally scary and goblin-esque. So I was surprised when I realized that there was a time when Dafoe was cast to play the male lead in an erotic thriller that has him carrying out multiple sex scenes. And with more than one partner over the course of the 99 minute running time.

The erotic thriller was Body of Evidence, which paired Dafoe with the iconic Madonna. Somehow it took me twenty-nine years to get around to watching this movie; there's so much naked Madonna on display, this would have been one of my favorites if I had seen it as a teenager.

Madonna's character is Rebecca Carlson, who is accused of using sex and drugs to bring about the death of her wealthy older lover. She is charged with murder for this and taken to trial. Dafoe's character is her defense attorney, Frank Dulaney. Even though Dulaney has a solid marriage with his wife Sharon (Julianne Moore) and they have an active sex life - we see proof of this - he still gets so horned up at the stories of Rebecca being a sex machine and is so attracted to her that he embarks on a sexual relationship with his client. And he discovers for himself that she is a sex machine with some kinky tastes. Handcuffs, candlewax, and risky public sex are elements in their trysts.

In between all the sex scenes, director Uli Edel and screenwriter Brad Mirman do manage to tell an intriguing mystery. I had low expectations for Body of Evidence going into it (clearly, I was never in any rush to see it), but actually ended up really enjoying it. And not just because of the nudity. I didn't like any of the characters very much, but I was interested in seeing where the story would go. There were some good twists and turns, and the movie had a nice thriller atmosphere to it. Critics tore this movie apart when it was released and Roger Ebert still listed it as one of his most hated movies a decade later, but I liked it. So did blog contributor Priscilla, who I watched it with. We were both surprised at how good we thought it was.