geena davis

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

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I recently attended a screening of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark at my local coffeeshop in Austin, Double Trouble (I’m screening Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Cherry Falls there on 10/17 and 10/31, and there will be a presentation of Paprika on 10/24 despite my absence; all screenings are at 8 PM, but get there early so you can get drinks and food!), and attached to the beginning of the film was a trailer for another New World Video release, Transylvania 6-5000. I’ve been curious about this one for a long time, since a horror comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, Jr., with a supporting role for Carol Kane, seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this movie is one of the least funny things that I have ever seen. 

Transylvania 6-5000 opens on Jack Harrison (Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Begley) being given instructions by their tabloid editor, who is also Gil’s father, to go to Transylvania and investigate the story behind a homemade videotape of two European men fleeing in terror from an unseen (except from the waist down) “Frankenstein” [‘s monster]. Harrison bristles at this, claiming that he was brought onto the paper to increase their journalistic integrity, to which the editor replies he was brought on to increase their vocabulary. Upon arrival in Transylvania, Gil makes himself the laughingstock of the village by outright asking a local if they have heard of any Frankenstein sightings, and Harrison takes particular umbrage at this because it might reduce his chances of hooking up with an American tourist, Elizabeth (Teresa Ganzel), who is traveling with her young daughter. The two “journalists” find themselves lodged at a creepy castle whose manager also happens to be the town’s mayor (convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones), who tells them that he plans to turn the place into a kind of Disney park for Transylvanian history. Every member of the staff is obnoxious, from butler Radu (John Byner) who calls everyone “master,” his unrelentingly irritating wife Lipi (Kane), and the film’s worst character by many miles, a bellboy/servant named Fejos (Michael “Kramer” Richards). Also, there’s a vampire lady in the castle, too, played by Geena Davis. 

You can imagine my excitement at reading all of those names in the opening credits (except for the obvious one), which was greatly outmatched by the utter disappointment that followed. After his second scene, every time that Richards appeared on screen, I would groan aloud. His character’s schtick is 50% incomplete pratfalls and the other half is prop comedy, like delivering a telegram to our tabloid boys clutched in a fake hand, so that when they take it, they pull the hand out of his sleeve. It’s shockingly unfunny. I’ve read that a lot of the film was improvised, with the notation that the overlong scene in which Radu and Lupi attempt to prepare a grapefruit having only the script direction “cut and serve fruit,” and that’s apparent in the finished product. Richards’s Fejos character constantly repeats “Come here, I want to show you something” or some variation thereof during virtually every moment that he’s on screen, and it has much the same energy of a child trying to prank their parent before they’ve developed any stage patter. At the end of the film it’s revealed that Radu and Lupi were supposed to be posing as people with hunched backs for the entire film, but when this was mentioned, it came as a complete surprise to everyone watching this in my apartment. One of the better comedic elements in that it manages to land some of the time is the instant conversion of “Dr. Malavaqua” from sincere and gentlemanly to unhinged and diabolical (Jekyll and Hyde style) upon crossing the threshold into his lab. But for every time this resulted in a polite chuckle, there was Fejos slipping on a banana peel or appearing from behind a painting. 

One of the friends who attended this viewing said that a lot of the conversation about the film online is from people who remembered loving the movie as children and returning to it as adults and being greatly disappointed. This was only my first viewing, but I can understand that as their experience. The film’s final act reveals that the mayor and the chief of police have been keeping Dr. Malavaqua sequestered because the coincidental similarities between his patients and classic Hammer Horror icons are ruining their attempts to revamp the town’s image for the purposes of non-monster tourism. The vampiress stalking Gil in the castle is merely a nymphomaniac wearing Halloween fangs because she was convinced that no man could ever love her (hence her getting a nosejob from the good doctor); the wolfman is only a man afflicted with severe hypertrichosis and Malavaqua is giving him electrolysis; and so on and so forth. This is probably the scene that most people remember from their youth, as it’s one of the few in which something interesting is happening. I also infer from the film’s continuous presence on Tubi that it’s been a cheap and easy license for basic cable filler since the mid-nineties, and if you tune in only to the second half, you’d probably have fewer memories of Harrison’s agonizing pursuit of Elizabeth and thus fonder memories overall. 

I cannot in good conscience recommend this one. Goldblum’s character’s smug arrogance and the underbaked concept that his greater journalistic prowess is demonstrated by his repeated skepticism about Gil’s experiences make him unlikable to a degree that Goldblum’s normal, effortless charm is unable to surmount it. Kane has no chemistry with Byner, and her entire character is the same joke over and over again—trying to help uselessly and refusing to get out of the way—and I know you’re telling yourself that it sounds like something that would be well within Kane’s wheelhouse but she is seriously off of her game here. If you have fond memories of this one, save yourself the heartbreak of losing them. If you haven’t seen it, then spare yourself the trouble. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quick Takes: Ghosts of Yule

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This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve.  That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories.  It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US.  While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set.  It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize.  So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.

The Uninvited (1944)

1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing.  More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted.  One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff.  The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost.  While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that.  It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions.  Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering.  It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game.  They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them.  Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks.  Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave.  The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus.  They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.

Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways.  From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss.  Dying is just not that big of a deal.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood.  Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor.  He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12.  Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.

Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day.  Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment.  All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since.  As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list.  It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat.  Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs.  Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit.  A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob.  That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body.  While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.

It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers.  During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom.  The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips.  It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice.  As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story.  There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

There’s Plenty Crying in Baseball

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In case you haven’t already heard this 1,000 times in the past few weeks, the new TV series A League of Their Own is very good and very, very gay.  It’s so good & gay, in fact, that it prompted 95-year-old retired baseball player Maybell Blair, the inspiration behind the show, to publicly come out of the closet for the first time.  Less significantly, it also prompted me to finally give the original 1992 Penny Marshall film it was adapted from a shot, after decades of avoidance.  That was also pretty good!  Both versions of A League of Their Own are winning, heartwarming portraits of complicated women who unite over a shared love of baseball; and in one of the versions, they sometimes make out.  In a recent podcast interview, Rosie O’Donnell vented frustrations that Marshall limited how much of the lesbian undercurrent could breach the surface of the original film, so in a way the new, queer-affirming TV show registers as a more comfortable, authentic version of the story they both telling.  Still, the 1992 original is just as much a rousing celebration of American women, one that just happens to be set on a baseball field.

The women in the original A League of Their Own are uniformly wonderful across the board, from the always-respected, regal screen presence of Geena Davis to the rarely-respected movie star machinations of Madonna.  They’re all great.  So, even though it’s miles beside the point in a movie that’s main objective is to celebrate women, I feel compelled to single out the only man in the main cast: the team’s disgraced alcoholic head coach, played by Tom Hanks.  It’s rare that I ever want to talk about Tom Hanks.  He seems like he’d be pleasant enough to be around in real life, but I don’t really care about his craft as a performer.  It’s been decades since Hanks would regularly make interesting choices in career outliers like Joe vs. The Volcano and The Burbs, and even then he was still playing an affable everyman in outlandish scenarios.  There was something thrilling about seeing professional nice guy Tom Hanks play a disgusting asshole for a change in A League of Their Own.  He’s a sloppy drunk misogynist drowning in his own liquor sweats, barely perking up enough from his mid-day blackouts to spit his chewing tobacco sludge onto the field instead of his shirt.  Hanks is vile in this film, which makes him a great foil (and reluctant collaborator) for the women on his team.  It also makes this one of his most interesting performances, by default.

I guess the question that’s nagging me is whether Tom Hanks is a good actor.  His performances as grotesque, sweaty mutants in A League of Their Own and the recent Elvis biopic are a fascinating contrast to his usual persona as America’s sweetheart uncle.  I can’t say either performance is particularly good, though.  His portrayal of Elvis’s overly controlling manager Col Tom Parker is more of an SNL accent & boardwalk caricature than a sincere performance . . . which is fine, except that it never feels purposeful or controlled.  Likewise, his tough-guy dipshit persona in A League of Their Own rings insincere & hollow in contrast to the rest of the cast.  It works in the context of the movie, where a powerful, defiant Geena Davis walks all over him as the self-appointed assistant coach who makes up for his shortcomings (backwards, in heels, etc.).  At the same time, though, it points to Hanks’s limitations as a performer.  Normally, I’d celebrate Hollywood celebrities getting cast against type, but the few times I’ve seen Hanks play villain it’s only helped illustrate how much better he is as a cookie-cutter Nice Guy™.  And even in that context, I only mean “better” in the sense that his performances are unnoticeable.  I’m most comfortable with not thinking about Tom Hanks at all, so when he colors outside the lines with fat-suit prosthetics, misogynist rants, and improv-night accents I really hate having to think about whether he’s a talented actor.  He seems like a nice guy and all, but seeming like a nice guy might be his only real talent.

I’m likely just looking for something to be a hater about here.  After recently enjoying this & the eerie ghost story Field of Dreams, I appear to be getting over my total disinterest in baseball as a subject. I need a new target to lash out at, and this widely beloved millionaire can surely take the hit.  A League of Their Own is great, and it uses Tom Hanks well, but his performance isn’t up to par with the rest of the cast.  Even Jon Lovitz is a more compelling misogynist asshole in his few minutes of screentime in the prologue, proving that going gross & going broad isn’t where Hanks goes wrong.  He’s just not that great of an actor, even if he is a great guy.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Change (1990)

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For years, I’ve been curious about the New York City-set heist comedy Quick Change because of a single, isolated image: Bill Murray robbing a bank while dressed like a birthday clown. Since at least as far back as Rushmore, Murray has been perpetually playing a sad clown type in nearly all of his onscreen roles, so it seemed too perfect that there was a film out there where he made the archetype literal. Unfortunately, Murray The Clown does not last too long into Quick Change‘s runtime. It makes for a wonderfully bizarre image, but the bank-robbing clown sequence is only a short introduction to the film’s larger plot. As a heist film, Quick Change does not put much stock into the intricate difficulties of robbing a bank in New York City; it’s more concerned with the complications of making away with the loot in a city that resembles an urbanized Hell. As the tagline puts it, “The bank robbery was easy. But getting out of New York was a nightmare.”

The cliché statement “New York City itself is a character in the film” usually means that a movie uses the rich, multicultural setting of the city to breathe life into the background atmosphere, usually by including a large cast of small roles from all walks of NYC life. In Quick Change, New York City is a character in that it’s a malicious villain, going out of its way to destroy the lives of the film’s bank-robbing anti-hero. In a media climate stuffed with so many gushing love letters to the magic of New York, Quick Change is fascinating as a harshly critical screed trying to tear the city down, which is an impressively bold perspective for unassuming mid-budget comedy. The birthday clown bank heist is certainly the best-looking & most impressively choreographed sequence of the film, especially in the gradual reveal that Murray had two insiders helping him pull off the robbery while hiding in plain sight as hostages (Geena Davis & Randy Quaid). The dynamic among this trio doesn’t hold as much emotional weight as the film requires it to, but they are amusingly dwarfed by the complex shittiness of a larger city that has trapped them with a never ending series of obstacles between them & the airport. Murray explains to his cohorts, in reference to the police on their tails, “Our only hope is that they’re mired in the same shit we have to wade in every day.” This filthy, crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York is crawling with reprobates always on the verge of sex & violence. Passersby whistle at & ogle Geena Davis and express disappointment when strangers nearly die but pull through. Mobsters, construction workers, and fascist bus drivers make simple tasks complex ordeals. Mexican immigrants joust on bicycles with sharpened garden tools. There’s a hideous, hateful side of the city waiting to reveal itself at every turn, which the movie posits as a facet of daily life in the Big Rotten Apple.

Quick Change falls at an interesting midpoint in Bill Murray’s career, halfway between the comedy megastar days of Ghostbusters & Stripes and the serious artist collaborations with auteurs like Wes Anderson & Sofia Coppola. Once Jonathan Demme dropped out as the film’s director, Murray himself stepped in as co-director (along with his partner in the elephant-themed road comedy Larger than Life, Howard Franklin) and you can see why it was important for him to hold onto the project in that way. Quick Change was not a commercial hit (despite positive reviews), but it does a good job of allowing Murray to play to his strengths as a downtrodden, put-upon cynic while still adhering to the general aesthetic of a commercially-friendly late 80s comedy (which unfortunately includes gay panic & racial stereotype humor in its DNA). A more interesting film might have held onto his birthday clown costuming for longer into the runtime, even as he struggled to escape the chaotic nastiness of New York City at large, but as a transitional piece between too radically different points in Murray’s career the movie is admirably goofy & bizarre. It even has a kind of cultural longevity in the way it includes then-young actors like Tony Shalhoub, Phil Hartman, and Kurtwood Smith among the general population of the ruffians of New York, a city the movie clearly hates.

-Brandon Ledet

Marjorie Prime (2017)

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Originally written for the stage, Marjorie Prime tells the story of multiple generations of the family of Marjorie (Lois Smith), an elderly woman with dementia. Her companions over the years range from two separate dogs named Toni-with-an-i, a caretaker who lets her sneak cigarettes (Stephanie Andujar), her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law John (Tim Robbins), and a holographic avatar of her late husband Walter (John Hamm), appearing as he did in his younger years. At the start of the film, Marjorie’s “Prime,” the avatar of Walter, is still learning from her. He helps her with his dementia: providing companionship, reminding her to eat, and recounting (and editing when asked) stories of their past together when Marjorie can’t remember. Tess is disturbed by his presence and his appearance, but John convinces her of the program’s value. When Marjorie dies, Tess gets a prime of her own in the form of Marjorie to deal with her grief. And so a cycle is created, one that echoes and ripples into eternity.

This is a deeply somber and introspective film, a poignant meditation on the nature of what we call memory and how we define it as an objective history as well as how, at its core, “memory” is ultimately both fallible and malleable. As Tess points out in the film, when we remember an event, what we’re actually remembering is the last time we remembered the event, back and back and back, like a series of photographs slowly fading out of focus in a recursive loop. Or, as underlined in another of the film’s conversations that mirrors the plot, one of Tess recounts how one of her students had inherited their father’s parrot, which sometimes still spoke with the dead man’s voice, even twenty years after his death. Love and grief have a profound effect on the way that our memories evolve and devolve and undergo a metamorphosis as we age, and the ravages of time on the human body and mind also contribute to this imperfect personal narrative.

If you search for the film online, it’s defined as a drama/mystery, but that’s not entirely accurate. There is a dark family secret that slowly unscrolls and unspools over the course of the movie’s runtime, recounted in different ways by different people (some of whom aren’t people at all), but it’s not a mystery that you want to solve. The characters in the film don’t want to remember, and that affects the viewer as well; once you know the truth, you remember that the urge to expunge is often as powerful as the urge to record, that the desire to remember is counterposed by all the things we wish we could forget.

Marjorie Prime is at turns celebratory and solemn, weaving back and forth through different perspectives and memories that seem at times false and sometimes too real, and occasionally both. The direction is organic, and the audience is drawn into the film naturally, as if you are in the living room with Tess and Marjorie as they discuss Tess’s own daughter, Marjorie’s memory of the night that Walter proposed, or going to get Toni-with-an-i 2 from the pound in “the old Subaru,” and how the more time passed the more Toni 1 and Toni 2 became the same dog in Marjorie’s memories. The deft hand of subtlety is felt throughout, be it in evidence of recurring musical talent among the women in the family (Marjorie the violinist, Tess the pianist, and the unseen blue-haired Reyna and her band), or in the way that the passage of time is reflected by the appearance of new lamps and other furniture, or in the film’s final moments, which have a distinct “There Will Come Soft Rains” vibe. It’s a story that will follow you all the way home and get into bed with you, and you’ll appreciate the companion for as long as it will let you, before it too passes into the unending waves of time that erode away memory as surely as the ocean obliterates footprints in the sand.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond