movie of the month

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990) is to John Hughes’ Oeuvre what Big Business (1988) is to Old Hollywood Comedies

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After my discovery that our February Movie of the Month, Big Business, was directed by one third of the ZAZ creative team behind classic genre parodies like Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun, I’ve been trying to make sense of the rest of Jim Abrahams’ catalog. What I found most interesting was that there were only three titles that didn’t fall in line with his genre-defining work in parody comedy. Big Business, as we know, is more of an homage than an outright spoof, but it could’ve easily undergone the typical ZAZ treatment with a couple re-writes. Ruthless People is a much more difficult film to understand in that context. A pitch black comedy inspired by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst (and starring Bette Midler, who steals the show in Big Business), it was made by the full ZAZ team, but never really threatens to be a parody or a spoof of the ransom-driven thriller as a genre. It’s by far the the furthest ZAZ outlier. Much closer in line to what Abrahams achieves in Big Business‘s Old Hollywood pastiche is the Winona Rider comedy Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, which feels palpably close to spoofing John Hughes’ work in teen comedies, but ends up functioning much more like a loving tribute.

A moody, gothy Winona Ryder headlines Roxy Carmichael as a fullblown version Aly Sheedy’s dour recluse in The Breakfast Club. Just like Sheedy, she looks like the world’s biggest Robert Smith fan, intentionally  isolates herself from peers, and treats the idea of personal hygiene like the exact kind of afflictions you might acquire if you completely disregarded personal hygiene. The movie pushes her high school “weird kid” attributes to an even more cartoonish degree, though, equipping her with an “ark” of abandoned animals that she adopts like a shanty farm, because that’s apparently what weirdo high schoolers do in their free time. The aching-for-a-boy-out-of-her-league growing pains, poor kid vs. the world class warfare, and uncaring parents all resemble characteristics of Molly Ringwald films like Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, except that they’re all crammed into the same feature. The movie even ends in a Big Dance confrontation, which feels like classic Hughes, and Ryder’s protagonist’s name sounds exactly like what she’d be called if she were the Weird Kid archetype in Not Another 80s Teen Movie: Dinky. Much like with Big Business, the line between homage & spoof feels very thin here & with the right push, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael could’ve easily fallen in line with the rest of the ZAZ catalog.

There’s something about working in the John Hughes realm that brings out new territory in Abraham’s work that might’ve been missing in his spoof & pastiche films (and whatever you want to call Ruthless People): genuine heart. It takes an innate understanding of genre tropes to be able to understand how to make an homage or a spoof work as a feature film & here Abrahams recognizes that what distinguishes John Hughes’ brand of 80s teen comedies is their heart on the sleeve sentimentality. It’s possible in this case, though, that he might’ve outdone his source material in creating the homage. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael has some brutal character moments, carried by both Winona Ryder & costar Jeff Daniels, who both play broken shells of people who feel cruelly rejected by both the ones they love & the world at large. And instead of bringing the drama to an everything-works-out-fine cinema magic climax, the film instead stages a huge emotional gut punch that feels a little rough for the genre that Abrahams was working in here. It was surprisingly powerful stuff.

It’s difficult to say whether or not a fan of Big Business would necessarily be floored by what’s offered in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The films are both heavily rooted in 80s fashion & genre convention, so there’s at least a chance that fans would bleed over. What’s far more important, though, is what the two films reveal about Jim Abrahams as a comedy director. It’s tempting to think of the ZAZ team as a sarcastic group of pranksters who simply regurgitate tropes with silly gags added, especially after watching how their comedy style has lead to such creative voids as Fifty Shades of Black, Vampires Suck, and Superfast!. However, what Big Business & Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael reveal is that Abrahams & his Zucker brother collaborators had a genuine love for the movies they were parodying & a deep understanding of how their tropes could be picked apart, reproduced, and repurposed for a new effect. Whether or not Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is just as good as the genuine John Hughes product is debatable (although it’d certainly be an easier case than arguing that Big Business is just as good as the Old Hollywood farces it emulates), but it’s undeniable that Abrahams understood how those films ticked & how they could be replicated for a new effect, a skill he presumably learned as a parody-happy prankster.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, a look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, and a reflection on where the film sits in relation to the rest of the Jim Abrahams catalog.

-Brandon Ledet

If Released in Another Time, Big Business (1988) Could’ve Easily Been a ZAZ-Style Spoof of Old Hollywood Farces

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Somehow during our lengthy conversation surrounding our February Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, I had foolishly overlooked who had actually directed the damned thing. Big Business‘s director, Jim Abrahams, is the “A” in the infamous comedic filmmaking team ZAZ. Along with brothers David & Jerry Zucker, Abrahams was responsible for popularizing the concept of the spoof comedy. As a collaborative trio ZAZ penned & directed Airplane!, Top Secret!, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Part Deux, and the Naked Gun trilogy, which pretty much covers the pillars of the medium. Flying solo, Abrahams also has screenwriting credits for Scary Movie 4, Kentucky Fried Movie, an some horrific-looking monster titled Jane Austen’s Mafia!. In isolation the name Jim Abrahams failed to ring any bells, but the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was a force to be reckoned with, one that changed the comedy cinema landscape if not for the better than at least for the sillier.

Although I feel foolish that I didn’t recognize Abrahams’ hand in Big Business sooner, it totally makes sense in retrospect. The most crucial aspect of the film that stuck out to me was its dedicated homage to Old Hollywood comedies. Viewing the film with Abrahams in mind now, I see a much different sort of half-formed homage lurking in Big Business. It’s basically just one gentle push away from an Old Hollywood spoof. The film’s swapped-twins contrivance, grand hotel setting, borrowed gag from Duck Soup, endless line of eligible bachelors waiting to marry its protagonists, narrow-minded depictions of the difference between wealth & poverty, and over-the-top lengths to keep its mismatched twins from ending the ruse all once played like a love letter to a bygone era in studio system filmmaking. Now they feel like seeds to what could’ve been a fullblown Old Hollywood spoof after a couple of joke-heavy rewrites. The framework for a ZAZ-style spoof is lurking just under the surface of Big Business, waiting, begging for a sea of juvenile gags to fill in the blanks.

I think the major reason why Big Business didn’t take that direction is a question of timing. The film was released during a time frame where Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were still a functioning unit, but the timing was off for an Old Hollywood spoof in terms of box office potential. If you look at the trio’s M.O., they generally stuck to spoofing film genres that were active in the era in which they worked. Airplane! spoofed the large-cast disaster film genre (specifically parodying Airport 1975 most heavily) at the tail end of the decade when they were A Thing. Top Secret! spoofed spy movies, a genre that never dies. The Hot Shots! series spoofed 80s & 90s action cinema in a time when that would’ve still been a relevant target, focusing heavily on Top Gun & Rambo for inspiration. Seeing as how it would’ve been impossible for Abrahams to create an Old Hollywood spoof in the Old Hollywood era, given that he was a child in its heyday, he would have had to achieved that distinction sometime in the 2000s or 2010s, long after the dissolution of the ZAZ partnership & well into his old age. Why so recently? Nostalgia has been kind to homages & parodies to the genre, which made room for wonderful comedies like Forgotten Silver & Hail, Caesar! to exist (though not flourish financially, unfortunately). In the 1988 an Old Hollywood spoof might’ve been hard to pitch to financiers, but in 2016 it’d have a much easier time making it to the cinema.

As is, Big Business has no interest in being an Old Hollywood parody. It is instead a loving homage to a bygone era in filmmaking. What Abrahams does instead is update the era’s comedic farce conventions for a 1980s sensibility, which was much less of a commercial gamble. That’s not to say that his history in genre parody did not inform his work in Big Business, though. If nothing else, Abrahams’ films display a consistent, innate understanding of genre tropes & how they can be made effective, whether for a genuine or a sarcastic effect. And if there’s any question to whether or not Big Business‘s toying with the idea of Old Hollywood parody was intentional, just look to Abrahams’ directorial cameo in the film. He plays a homeless drunk who rubs his eyes & tosses his liquor bottle aside when he keeps seeing the two sets of twins separately, a gag that’s about as old as comedy cinema itself (if not older). At the very beat before the end credits the film reveals that a second, well-dressed, far-from-homeless character was also portrayed by Abrahams, a reveal that’s meant to play as a huge prank. That moment feels like it easily could’ve been at home in the theoretical spoof version of Big Business that sadly doesn’t exist, not only because it feels so hokily old-fashioned, but also because its “Gotcha!” sarcasm is such a classic ZAZ-style tactic.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

-Brandon Ledet

Big Business (1988)’s Old Hollywood Roots in Duck Soup (1933)

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During our Swampchat discussion of February’s Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, we paid a lot of attention to the film’s roots in Old Hollywood farces. Although Big Business originates as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, its tone & setting are much more in line with a very specific era of 30s & 40s Hollywood comedy pictures. This makes total sense, since it’s the exact kind of stuff Tomlin & Midler would’ve grown up loving.

It’s easy to see the Old Hollywood love all throughout Big Business, but I think the most recognizable, highly specific moment where its homage to the era bleeds through is in the scene where Midler meets her estranged twin in a bathroom “mirror”. Besides being an exquisite display of physical comedy that recalls leftover tricks of the trade from the silent era & vaudevillian performance, it’s also a near-exact replica of a scene from my favorite Marx Brothers’ film, Duck Soup. Midler’s scene requires her to carry a full load of work that was shared between Harpo & Groucho Marx in its Duck Soup origins, so the dynamics of the gag are a little different, but I believe the sentiment shared between the two scenes is nearly identical.

See for yourself! If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Big Business or Duck Soup (and you really should), at least check out the extended “mirror” gag shared between the two films. They’re sublimely choreographed examples of physical comedy at its best.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Erin watch Big Business (1988).

Britnee: Many years ago, there was a local video rental shop in my hometown called Slick Sam’s (sounds more like a dirty sex shop), and that’s where I first came across one of my all-time favorite movies, Jim Abrahams’ 1988 comedy, Big Business. I can still see that sun-damaged, styrofoam-stuffed VHS cover sitting on the shelf just waiting for me to grab it. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that no one in the Swampflix crew had seen Big Business before, so I was able to make it my Movie of the Month selection for February. There’s not much love out there for this comic masterpiece, and it really does deserve some recognition.

In a small town called Jupiter Hollow, two women give birth to two sets of identical twin girls at the same time at a local hospital. One woman, Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush), is a big city snob that just so happened to go into labor while passing through Jupiter Hollow with her husband, but the other woman, Iona Ratliff (Patricia Gaul), is a local. The Sheltons and the Ratliffs coincidentally both name their twin daughters Rose and Sadie, and a kooky old nurse mixes up the sets of identical twins. About 40 years later, Sadie and Rose Shelton (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are rich business women living in NYC while Sadie and Rose Ratliff (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are country bumpkins living in Jupiter Hollow. Eventually, the two sets of twins end up in NYC at the same time, and all sorts of wacky things happen.

The performances by Midler and Tomlin are insanely impressive in this film. Midler plays a bitchy NYC snob (Sadie Shelton) and a kind small-town girl looking for adventure (Sadie Ratliff), and Tomlin plays a sweet, softspoken city girl (Rose Shelton) and a rough n’ tough country gal (Rose Ratliff). Portraying such different characters must’ve been such a difficult task for these comedy queens, but they both deliver.

Brandon, were you impressed by the versatile performances from Midler and Tomlin? Or were they just mediocre?

Brandon: I mean, Midler & Tomlin are both phenomenal personalities in general, so it’d be a total lie to say that anything they do or say is mediocre. However, it’s pretty clear that they both had a part they had more fun playing. It’s difficult to say which performance stands out most here between the two actresses, not because there isn’t a clear winner, but because the movie splits their performances into four quadrants: Rich Sadie & Poor Sadie (Midler) and Rich Rose & Poor Rose (Tomlin). There’s a definite, old fashioned nature>nurture mentality at work in Big Business, though, so the individual sisters who lucked into being raised in their “rightful” class environments are the more fun characters to watch, because their confidence is infectious. Poor Rose is certainly amusing in her bossy-but-small-minded local yokel skepticism. It’s Rich Sadie, however, who steals the show for me. As the Reaganomics-personified antagonist of the film, she’s allowed to be the most devious and, because Bette Midler is such a fabulous comedic performer, she strikes just the right tone of evil bitch that this film needed. Midler’s performance as Rich Sadie is just short of being a world-class drag routine. The way she saunters & pouts, insulting people’s outfits by saying “You look like a blood clot” while rocking the world’s largest shoulder pads is just begging for a drag-themed floor show revival. Poor Sadie has a couple of funny moments, mostly in a scene where she milks a cow to the beat of a country song & in her unholy fusion of Carribean-themed yodeling, but it feels like not nearly as much effort went into her character as the over-the-top vamping of her wealthy counterpart. The same could be said of Rich Rose. Tomlin & Midler are both fantastic in this film, but as far as versatility goes, it’s easy to see which characters got more attention.

Besides the easy likability of Midler & Tomlin in this film, something that really stood out to me is how old-fashioned everything feels. The swapped-twins plot of Big Business feels like it’s straight out of an Old Hollywood comedy, the kind that Fred & Ginger might’ve starred in if it had been released 50 years earlier. The nature-over-nurture value system of the movie is very much an antiquated line of thinking and (although there’s some confusion about who winds up with whom at the end) the film’s intense concern with finding each sister a potential mate is very much in line with the structure of a traditional comedy. Instead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Big Business is more like A Million Beaus for Four Sisters. As the two sets of mismatched twins find themselves nearly-but-never-quite bumping into each other while all staying at the same hotel, I felt like I was watching a Marx Brothers movie. Hammering the point home, Midler even recreates the infamous Marx Brothers mirror gag from Duck Soup in the scene where her two characters finally meet for the first time. Fred Ward’s oblivious-to-homosexuality line reading of “You guys are alright” reads a lot like the classic “Nobody’s perfect!” zinger in Some Like It Hot. There’s even a gag where a homeless drunk rubs his eyes in disbelief when he sees both sets of twins walk by, immediately tossing away the bottle he’s clutching. I’m not sure that cinematic gags get much older than that.

What do you think of this film’s classic Hollywood callbacks, Boomer? Were they an intentional homage to the Old Hollywood era or just a strange coincidence for a comedy that happened to be old-fashioned by nature?

Boomer: I’m not much of a fan of comedies of error in which the humor relies too heavily on farcical near-misses, and there was a point in this movie where I lost heart as I realized that the film was saving the inevitable serendipitous union of the City and Country Mice for the end of the film. Once I had this epiphany and stopped waiting for the film to get to that point, I found myself enjoying the movie more straightforwardly, and was pleased that the mistaken-identity elements weren’t played for cringe-comedy as much as I had expected. As has been noted, this is a classic Hollywood farce, which really serves to demonstrate to what extent Old Hollywood was still working from a centuries-old storytelling paradigm; this isn’t really an Old Hollywood Farce so much as it is a Old Globe Farce, based on William Shakespeare’s genre-defining Comedy of Errors. In essence, Big Business is a throwback to a time when films were based almost entirely on dramas that were ancient even then, making the film old-fashioned by default, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My major problem with the film comes from the way that its antiquated nature shows through in the film’s moral.

When viewing the four main characters, only Poor Rose and Rich Sadie seem truly suited for their positions in life, with Rich Rose and Poor Sadie being reasonably well-adjusted but largely unfulfilled. Ignoring the two women who are in their “rightful” lives, Poor Sadie’s desire for a more exciting life than pig wrasslin’ and yodeling can provide evokes more empathy for her than the audience can really muster for Rich Rose, who certainly has the financial means to forsake her supposedly incomplete life for the purported pleasures of rural domesticity. As such, Rich Rose is the character who gets the least characterization, really only developing once Roone shows up in the third act. This would be a fine exploration of the nature/nurture dichotomy, were it not for the fact that, ultimately, Poor Sadie comes to the decision that not only is the way of life in Jupiter Hollow worth preserving, it’s worth praising as well; she forsakes her biological sister’s urban and urbane world to return to performing percussive cow milking alongside toothless men whose musical expertise is limited to playing moonshine jugs, and we, as an audience, are supposed to feel gratified by this conclusion. Rural living is the right fit for everyone, except the shrewish antagonist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I got plenty of laughs out of Tomlin and Midler’s performances here, and even the potentially painful farce worked for me. I was just hoping for one more twist (for instance, that the Sadies were actually the children of the Ratliffs and that the Roses were the Sheltons’ daughters) that would make the film less overt in its praise for downhome simplicity over metropolitan cynicism. To a man, all of the New York-based characters that are not Rich Rose are foppish, conceited, untrustworthy, manipulative, and greedy, with the implication being that Rose feels unfulfilled because she is genetically predisposed toward “goodness,” being the child of salt-of-the-earth outlanders. But the “goodness” of rural living is enough to almost completely deprogram Poor Sadie, who is tempted by the carnal delights that ensnare and comprise Rich Sadie’s identity and existence but is able to reject them. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Erin, am I reading too much into this, or allowing my perception of the film to color my enjoyment of it too much? Is there something that mitigates this seeming moral that I may have overlooked? And what do you think about the Old Hollywood elements–do they work?

Erin: Boomer, I feel a little differently about the portrayal of country vs. city life, and I think that I came to slightly different conclusions about Big Business‘s moral assessment of both. I’d have to say that in true farcical fashion, both city life and country life are portrayed with an eye to their preposterous sides – yodeling and “making love in the back of a recreational vehicle” versus designer women in designer sneakers and the pompousness of grapefruits under silver lids.

Where I feel differently is that the on-screen portrayal of urban life seems to be much more positive than the portrayal of rural life. The Welcome to New York Montage, while funny, adheres pretty closely to the cinematic trope of New York as a vibrant, wonderful city (thought this might be more related to the visual presentation of Poor Sadie’s desires). Big Business‘s New York seems to be entirely made of the Plaza hotel and satin, even if its denizens are amoral and greedy. Rural life has gingham, and large, poor families.

If the moral of the story really is that rural life is better, I think it balances strangely against the onscreen portrayals of the rural and urban worlds. In a way, I think that starts to answer the second part of your question about the Old Hollywood elements (or the Old Globe elements, Big Business is truly a Shakespearean farce). I agree that that the movie reads as an old-fashioned screwball comedy and is pretty simple in terms of plot. On the other hand, I think that Big Business reads extremely well as an 80s movie. It’s got Bette Midler as a Power Lead (in TWO roles!), Big Business as the Big Bad, and steel drums lining the streets of New York.

What do you think, Britnee? To continue Boomer’s line of question, does Big Business manage to read well as an 80s movie? Does the old fashioned plot work well amongst the shoulder pads and polka dots of the 1980s?

Britnee: I’ve always viewed Big Business as a prime example of an 80s comedy. It’s packed with cheesy humor, wacky facial expressions, pumps and power suits, and of course, Bette Midler in her prime. It’s an 80s explosion! It wasn’t until this discussion that I realized that there are quite a few Old Hollywood elements present in this film. Now that I’m looking at the film through a much different lens, the movie is more interesting and much smarter than I initially thought. Creating a film that contains classical comic film features for an 80s audience mustn’t have been an easy task, but it’s a match made in heaven.

I know that this is completely off track, but I think that the film’s music deserves a bit of discussion. There are only two major lyrical songs in the film: Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and George Benson’s “On Broadway.” Both songs work well in the film (they’re so New York!), but as for the film’s instrumental tracks, they’re all kinds of ridiculous. It’s the type of music that belongs in a department store’s training video. Part of me feels as though the music was a bit too much, but another part of me thinks that the obnoxious tunes contributed to the film’s campiness.

Brandon, did you find the instrumental music in the film to be annoying or am I overthinking this?

Brandon: I don’t know if “annoying” is the word I would use. Maybe “cheesy”? Maybe “eccentric”? It’s undeniable that the background music of Big Business is always present, always noticeable, and perhaps even always awful, but I found it somehow added to the film’s charm. The soundtrack is another one of the areas where the film feels trapped between two times. Its big band music (which is mostly contained in the 1940s prologue) & countryside yodeling are decidedly old-fashioned, but the department store pop songs Britnee mentioned & the endless droning sax are so 80s it ain’t even funny (well, it’s a little funny). I don’t know if it was the exact DVD copy Britnee & I were watching or if the film was intentionally mixed this way, but the soft sax rock aspects were particularly noticeable (in that they were deafening) & particularly amusing. What really got me laughing, though, was the obnoxiously dramatic drum fills that crash the scene at the film’s climax. It’s as if Neil Peart had dropped in at the sound booth to add some last minute touches for the soundtrack.

Going back to that 1940s prologue for a second, the film starts in the old-timey countryside town of Jupiter Hollow, which prompted me to write “Stars Hollow” (the fictional town from Gilmore Girls, of course) in my notes. It was a surprise, then, that Gilmore Girls vet Edward Hermann (who, sadly, passed away a little over a year ago) appears in this film, delivering one of many great performances. It was also cool to see Seth Green run around as a raucous baby (almost literally) as well as the weird coincidence that both of the Roses’ beaus are future Tremors compatriots (Michael Gross & Fred Ward). All of this and Deborah Rush, aka Jerri Blank’s mom. The cast of supporting characters is surprisingly stacked, as long as you care about the niche pop culture properties they’re best known for.

Boomer, were there any supporting roles in particular that stood out to you as a favorite? Midler & Tomlin easily get the most to do, but I feel there was plenty enough opportunities for the other actors to shine.

Boomer: It’s funny, I was delighted to see Deborah Rush in this film, as she’s always an absolute delight, especially when she’s playing a terrible mother figure (Jerri Blank was a hot mess before she ever showed up, but Piper Chapman’s insufferable insulated white privilege nonsense is all on Rush’s padded shoulders). I was pretty disappointed that she disappears after her part in initiating the plot, but she does make the best of her limited screen time. I also really enjoyed watching tiny Seth Green run around as a screaming terror, and got a kick out of seeing Michael Gross, who will always be doomsday prepper Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise to me (although I didn’t make the Fred Ward connection that Brandon did). My favorite minor role came from Mary Gross, Michael’s sister, who played the soft-voiced secretary working for the Sheltons; as an actress, she’ll always have a place in my heart because of her involvement in Troop Beverly Hills. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I looked up the name of the actor who played the put-upon desk clerk, Joe Grifasi, but I couldn’t place him in any memorable roles based on a quick scan of his IMDb page; he must simply be one of those classic “that guy” actors.

It was a very minor role that has really stuck with me since watching the film. The narrative saw fit to include a vagrant character who oversees the comings and goings of the Plaza. This is a well-worn comedy cliche: a drunken vagrant sees some unbelievable sight, looks at the bottle in his hand, back at the unbelievable sight, and then tosses the bottle behind him. Normally, this character is never seen again, but this film brings back our friend a few times; we watch him catch sight of the Roses and Sadies coming and going multiple times. All in all, it seems like he gets more screen time than some of the lesser love interests. From the outside, this mostly low-stakes (give or take the fate of Jupiter Hollow, which is easy to forget in all the identity confusion shenanigans) rom com farce occurs entirely outside of the context of this character; as a result, his story plays out as a window into an existential horror that he can only passively observe. The Plaza: if you stand outside long enough, you’ll see yourself come out of there. And then he does! That’s some In The Mouth of Madness… um, madness.

While prowling through the sparse information that the internet has to offer about this film and its development, I read that the sets for the film were so expensive that ABC created an entire television series to use the sets in an attempt to recoup their losses. The series flopped and never made it out of its first season. It does make one wonder, though; would Big Business have worked as an ongoing series? It seems like it would, what with the potential to have stock twin hijinx intersect with stock cultural differences plots.

What do you think, Erin? Would this idea have legs? And in what stock sitcom situations would you most like to see the Shelton-Ratliff sisters (recast for a TV budget, of course)?

Erin: Boomer, I can definitely see at least a two-season Big Business show combining stock twin hijinks and stock cultural differences.  It would take a deft hand to extend the premise outside of the obvious shenanigans.  I’m envisioning a Green Acres meets Beverly Hillbillies situation.  Shoulder pads on the farm!  Country Rose get mixed up with big city Mafia!  Mistaken identities galore!  Pie and jam competitions at the fair!  Rich Sadie turns out to be a heck of a pig-caller!  Moonshine!  Country twins accidentally attend the Met Ball!

There’s at least half a season right there.  The challenge would be extending the premise into something stable and complex enough to keep a show on the air, but the promise of the ensemble cast might make it work.  I wonder if it’s cheaper to find multiple sets of twins or to constantly produce a double effect through camera and editing tricks.

I think that that my best description of Big Business would include words like madcap and zany.  It was definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it looked like the cast was also having a great time during filming.  That always makes a movie better for me.  All in all, I think that it was a solid entry in the filmography of the 1980s.  It’s charming and fluffy, with few dull moments and lots of shoulder pads.

Lagniappe

Erin: The fashions worn by the two sets of sisters are almost characters in themselves.  Big Business is almost worth watching just for the clothes!

Britnee: I really like Poor Sadie’s initial yodeling number that she performed at the Jupiter Hallow fair. “Well, hello, Jupiter Hallow. I know you’re doing fine. Every day you work the factory, every night a jug of wine,” is what immediately enters my head when I think about Big Business. I’m not a big fan of yodeling, but Midler has one of those voices that can make anything catchy and enjoyable.

Boomer: I was a bit disappointed that Sadie Ratliff ended up with (as I interpreted it) Sadie Shelton’s ex husband. They barely shared a scene or two, and she had much more chemistry with the desk clerk.

Brandon: Going back to what Boomer was saying about the vilification of city life vs the deification of the countryside, that push & pull didn’t bother me too, too much, but I will say that the evil “big business” end of the equation felt a lot more convincing & well-developed. I especially appreciated the Reaganomics-speak of the NYC twins’ inherited company, Moramax: “More for America”. As far as satire goes, that specific phrase easily ranks up there with Robocop & Gremlins II: The New Batch in poking fun at the state of class structure in the 1980s, even if most of the film’s message boils down to a simple rich = stressed out & snooty, poor = sweet & serene.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Erin presents Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
April: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
May: Brandon presents Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

-The Swampflix Crew

Forgotten Silver (1995): Peter Jackson’s Silent Film Precursor to The Independent (2000)

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Five years before our December Movie of the Month, 2000’s Jerry Stiller comedy The Independent, went straight to DVD a very similar mockumentary aired on New Zealand television: 1995’s Forgotten Silver. Although Forgotten Silver covers cinema’s early, silent era while The Independent covers its B-movie & drive-in time frame, the two mockumentaries are very similarly minded both in their reverence for the medium they’re spoofing and in their depictions of madmen auteur directors possessed by their passion for filmmaking & troubled by their failure to secure proper funding for their art. While The Independent is a brilliant, must-see comedy for schlock junkies & Roger Corman fanboys, Forgotten Silver covers the same territory for cinephiles & Criterion fetishists.

When it was first introduced to New Zealand audiences, Forgotten Silver was framed as a true-life documentary of “forgotten” (read: fictional) filmmaker Colin McKenzie, who supposedly operated during cinema’s birth at the turn of the century through the tail end of the silent era in the late 20s. Much like how The Independent‘s Morty Fineman accidentally pioneered cinema in his quest to make movies about “tits, ass, and bombs” Colin McKenzie was credited here for accidentally inventing the world’s first tracking shot, color film, feature length film, talkie, close-up, and candid camera comedy, among other firsts. Although this list of feats is beyond preposterous for an unknown filmmaker (and they all end in blunderous fates like smut charges & miscarriages) its deadpan delivery & adherence to a traditional documentary format make it somewhat understandable that some television audiences were initially duped by Forgotten Silver‘s validity as a document of a real-life auteur. It’s got a much more wry, Woody Allen’s Take the Money & Run style of mockumentary humor in contrast to The Independent‘s more over-the-top, Christopher Guest-esque approach to comedy.

It’s difficult to say for sure if Forgotten Silver provided any direct inspiration for The Independent, but there are some undeniable similarities in their DNA. While Forgotten Silver is concerned with restoration of McKenzie’s entire catalog, The Independent follows the discovery & restoration of Fineman’s “lost” anti-herpes PSA The Simplex Complex. Also like The Independent, Forgotten Silver is mostly concerned with the completion of a single feature film, this time profiling the production of Salome, a multi-year production of a Biblical epic featuring 15,000 extras, a city-sized hand-built set, and endless funding issues that similarly plagued Fineman’s Ms. Kevorkian. The film also establishes its legitimacy as a documentary by enlisting several big names in art cinema – producer Harvey Weinstein, critic Leonard Maltin, and actor Sam Neill among them – to provide interview fodder. Peter Jackson, the film’s co-director/creator alongside documentarian Costa Botes, get the most screentime of all, framing the story of how McKenzie’s films were found & restored and what significance they have to the history of cinema at large in his talking head interviews.

The differences between Forgotten Silver & The Independent are just as apparent. Because Colin McKenzie was (fictionally-speaking) long dead before Peter Jackson brought his work to light, Jackson serves as the central voice in Forgotten Silver. Morty Fineman, on the other hand, is Jerry Stiller alive & at his loudest & most demanding, dominating The Independent‘s runtime. The films’ tones are also drastically different. The only time Forgotten Silver approaches The Independent‘s over-the-top ridiculousness is in its depictions of sub-Charlie Chaplin vaudeville routines involving cream pies that McKenzie filmed in order to financially support Salome. For the most part, though, the two films are remarkably simpatico. At heart, they both aim to resurrect long-dead cinema genres in loving spoof form. Forgotten Silver‘s approach is just more subdued & deadpan due to the nature of its turn-of-the-century subject matter. The Independent is a much flashier, more over-the-top comedy, which makes sense given its exploitation cinema homage. Both are great, must-see comedic gems for cinephiles in either camp.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, 2000’s The Independent, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this transcription of Morty Fineman’s fictional filmography, and last week’s recommendation that you also watch the documentary Corman’s World to get the full picture..

-Brandon Ledet

 

 

Required Viewing for Fans of The Independent (2000): Corman’s World (2011)

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In our Swampchat discussion of December’s Movie of the Month, the 2000 Jerry Stiller comedy The Independent, we praised the film for feeling remarkably ahead of its time in terms of the modern comedy landscape. Long stretches of the film wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern HBO anti-hero comedy or post-The Office docucomedy, which is true even if both genres are pulling influence from the same souce as The Independent – Christopher Guest mockumentaries. That’s not the only way in which The Independent was ahead of its time, though. Most mockumentaries & spoof comedies wait until the material they’re mocking is actually released. The ever-prescient The Independent, on the other hand, was released more than a decade before the documentary it most resembles – 2011’s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Roger Corman not only appears in brief “interviews” for The Independent, but Jerry Stiller’s schlockmeister protagonist Morty Fineman mostly serves as a Roger Corman archetype (with maybe a little David Friedman or Russ Meyer sleaze thrown in for good measure). Fineman’s 427 B-movies oeuvre may seem comically oversized & impossible for a filmmaker to achieve, but the timeless Roger Corman (who began making film in the 50s & continues to work to this day) has a whopping 409 production credits (and 56 directoral credits) according to IMDb. For every infamous Roger Corman trashterpiece (Rock & Roll High Schol, A Bucket of Blood, Death Race 2000, Piranha, etc.) there’s dozens of titles lurking in the archives that no one remembers at all, a sentiment reflected in the way that a dozen or so Fineman features are represented throughout The Independent, but hundreds are listed in his filmography that runs in tandem with the end credits.

There’s so much Corman in Fineman that the connection is undeniable, especially if you consider the way that unlikely former Corman collaborators pop up in both The Independent & Corman’s World – particularly Ron Howard & Peter Bogdanovich. There’s also  the two directors’ love for Ingmar Bergman – reflected in Fineman’s herpes-themed The Simplex Complex & in the odd, real-life detail that Corman used to provide distribution for the Swedish auteur’s films at American drive-ins because he thought people needed to see them. The truest connection of all, though, is in the clips of the two directors’ films – Fineman’s fake & Corman’s real. Corman talks at length about the value of text vs. subtext in sneaking in political messages in trashy B-movies features, but watching clips of his work in Corman’s World suggests that the director might be more in line with Fineman’s confession that he was mostly interested in the “tits, ass, and bombs” than he was putting on.

Corman’s World is an invaluable documentary, one that should be required viewing for all movie lovers whether or not they’ve indulged in The Independent‘s delights. Corman himself is just so full of insight from decades of hands-on experience. I particularly enjoyed his rigid, formulaic approach to genre films, like the way he describes that creature features need their monsters to kill someone fairly gruesome easily in the film, then kill at regular, less-shocking intervals until the blood-all-over-the-screen finale. It’s also a delight to see such twisted imagery & violent, sex-depraved themes originate from such a calm, professorial source, a dichotomy he describes as the outer image vs. the unconscious mind. This detail is missing in Fineman’s character, who is just as explosive in his art as he is in his personalty. There’s also a Russ Meyer-esque sleaziness in Fineman that’s entirely absent in the oddly-refined Corman.

What’s most interesting, though, is the ways in which Corman’s career phases serve as a blueprint for the history of cult cinema. Corman started by making creature features & teen rebellion dramas in the 1950s. He then moved on to the much classier “Poe cycle” of his career, a string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that married art house aesthetic with B-movie camp (including February’s Movie of the Month, The Masque of the Red Death). This lead him to indulging in arty hippie movies & giving a shot to young Hollywood voices that positioned him as the paterfamilias of the golden era of New Hollywood. Once his collaborators outgrew him & left him behind (names like Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Coppola, and Fonda), Corman survived on a second wave of trashy exploitation cinema until big budget films he heavily influenced (like Star Wars & Jaws) effectively disassembled the drive-in movie market & drove him to home video cheapness & SyFy Channel mockbusters. The story of Roger Corman’s career is the story of modern cinema at large, something that could also be said about the fictional Morty Fineman.

A lot of Corman’s more artistic impulses are missing in the eternal businessman Fineman, but there really is something to say about Corman & his ilk’s ability to make interesting, profitable pictures on shoestring budgets. Fineman doesn’t have fictional credits that match up with Corman’s racial segregation protest film The Intruder or the soaring artistry of the Poe Cycle, but the two directors do hare an eye for finance. As (frequently Corman collaborator) Jack Nicholson puts it in Corman’s World, “A filmmaker who doesn’t understand money is like an artist who doesn’t understand paint.” The Independent is all about Morty Fineman securing funding for yet another B-picture & even though themselves don’t look especially promising, it really is awe-inspiring to see Corman still at work, stealing shots & cutting expenses for SyFy Channel originals (which are essentially Roger Corman knockoffs), Fineman & Corman are survivors, unlikely successes navigating inhospitable waters for decades on end.

Thankfully, Corman’s success story at the conclusion of Corman’s World is much more impressive than Fineman’s at the end of The Independent. Fineman secures funding for his next picture, surviving to see another day & attending a small-town film festival held in his honor. Corman, on the other hand, receives a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, a much-deserved distinction for a director who could film movies as memorable as Little Shop of Horrors in a weekend or provide an environment in which Peter Bogdanovich’s first directorial credit is something called The Gill Women of Venus (aka Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). I’m glad to see Corman receive the recognition he deserves from The Academy, but it’s almost an even greater achievement that he earned a loosely-based mockumentary homage  in (the albeit little-loved, little remembered) The Independent. The Independent & Corman’s World are inescapably linked in my mind as celebrations of one of cinemas most criminally under-celebrated heroes. Even though one is fictional & the other is a documentary, they’re both indispensable in their reverence for a wonderful artist.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, 2000’s The Independent, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & this transcription of Morty Fineman’s fictional filmography.

-Brandon Ledet

Morty Fineman’s Filmography as Listed at the End of The Independent (2000)

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Our selection for December’s Movie of the Month is The Independent, a straight-to-DVD mockumentary in which Jerry Stiller plays Morty Fineman, a Roger Corman/Russ Meyer/Ed Wood/David Friedman schlock director archetype with a grand vision & limited means. Way ahead of its time considering the modern comedy landscape, The Independent features great Christopher Guest-style character work in its talented cast of deeply flawed anti-heroes, but our favorite part of the film is its short-form B-movie spoofs handpicked from Fineman’s fictional filmography. There are dozens of titles from Finemans’ collection represented in the film in the form of brief clips & mock-up posters, but the only representation of his work as a whole can be found in the “complete filmography” that runs in tandem with the end credits, kind of like James O. Incandenza’s “complete filmography” footnote at the back of Infinite Jest.

Fandom for The Independent is scarce at best, so it’s difficult to find too much information on the film. I though it was a shame, for instance, that there’s no trace of Morty Fineman’s “complete filmography” listed online, since it is a pretty great collection of ridiculous one-liners. A lot of our conversation about the film centered on which of Fineman’s films we’d like to see realized, but since the complete list is only available in the end credits, I’m sure we missed a bunch of great gags worth exploring. So, here’s a complete transcription of Morty Finemans’ 427 feature filmography as it appears in The Independent. I don’t mean to make myself out to be a hero, but I feel I’m doing the world a great service here, just as I expect Fineman felt he was doing the world a service when he warned the troops about the dangers of herpes in The Simplex Complex or when he exposed the evils of marijuana in Panic Grass.

MORTY FINEMAN: A COMPLETE FILMOGRAPHY

1964
The Simplex Complex (Non-Theatrical)

1967
Corn: The Ear of Plenty (Non-Theatrical)

1969
Groovy Hippie Slumber Party
Free Love for Sale
Psychedelic Elevator
Brothers Divided
Mondo World
The Young Hip-Ocrits
The Mod, Mod Miniskirt

1970
The Student Coeds
The President Wore a Bikini
The Peacenik Orgy
Bummer, Ma’am
Teenage Flag Burners
Suburban Peepers
Pig Busters
Hillbilly Slip-Around
Panic Grass
33 1/3rd Sexual Revolutions

1971
L.S.D.-Day
The Naughty Swingers
Meter Reader Lolita
One-Eyed Wink
Sock It To the Man
Hot Pants Hoedown
The Evil Membrane
Luv Canal
His ‘n’ Hers ‘n’ His
Papa Woody!
The Eco-Angels

1972
Teenie Weenie Bikini Beach
Squished
Draft Dodger
Lawn Honkie
Crazy Dragonbreath: The Forgettin’ Tibetan
Shindig Motel
Strong, Hard and Black
The Free Riders (Chico and Chaco)
The Well-Marbled Goddess
Itty Bitty Fragidity
Sympathetic Vibrations
Diaper Service
The Peace Zombies

1973
The Moistening
Kung Funk: The Funky Fu
World War III
Diorhythm Method
P.U.!
Day Glo Decolletage
Legalize It
Der Ubergoober
Brothers Under the Covers
The Pollenators
Blood Haze
Neat But Not Clean
Amazon Hot Box
Giant Rabbit, Run!
Destination ‘Shroom
Bald Justice

1974
(Plain Ole) Pud
Draft Dodger II: Makin’ Canadian Bacon
Hollywood Squares: The Movie
Kung Funk II: The Spooky Fu
Coven of Witchiness
American Flesh
Our Gas Line Affair
Kidnap Those Kooks
Chicks With Hicks
I am Curious . . . You are Yellow
The Harlem Globetrotters Meet the Black Panthers
Giant Crab, Run!
Roachclip Motel
Venus De Mofo
Romeo-a-Go-Go
Buddy Cops: Bookworm and Garter Snake
The True Life Historical Search (For Genuine Real Stuff in the Bible)
Carnival of Mutants
Giant Rabid Dog, Run!

1975
Kent State Nurses
What Planet is This? (Oh My God It’s Earth!)
The Wrath of the Sabine Women
Truckstop Nurses
White House Crooks
C.B.B.C. (Citizen’s Band Before Christ)
Pull My Finger
Brick Sh*thouse
Puberty County Line
Strong, Hard and Native American
What’s Your Sign, M’Lady?
Kohutek, Run!
Swig and Guzzle
Smooth Move, Ex-Wife
Buddy Cops II: Hammerhead and Nailbiter
Life Spasm
Psycho Vet
BT off a Zombie
Infection
Something Big’s on Fire ’75
Bigfoot, All American
Gas, Grass or Ass
Pigeonholers
Assassin in a See-Thru Blouse

1976
The Foxy Chocolate Robot
Return to Moonshine High
The Greatest Bicentennial American Patriot
Da Brothers Bump
Cage Full of Waitresses
Draft Dodger III: The Me Decade
Contact High School
Hot Mamarama
Three Times Fast
Unknown Epidemic, Run!
Metaphors Are Like Dreams
Used Tissue of Lies
Wind and Rain and Wet T-Shirts
Dirt Claude
Ten on a Couch
Buddy Cops III: Strawman and Firebrand
Fat, Dumb and Fuzzy
Sand in my Teddy
Sex Doctor to the Stars
Third Leg’s a Charm
A Stranger Wears My Pants
Nuclear Nun
Wise and Foolish Vixens

1977
Psycho Vet II: The Reenlistment
Cattle Mutilation
Prescription for Justice
Tarzan of the Mall
Neurotica
Mythomania
Steel Hog Hunger Rumbles
Dirt Road Blacktop
Similes Are Dreams
Six-Chambered Heart, Four-Chambered Gun
Go Tell it on the Mountain, Just Get the Hell Out of My House!
Normal Horny Norman
Ebony, Fawn & Jade
Buddy Cops IV: Short Fuse and Longhair
FLK [Funny Lookin’ Kid]
The Family Jeweler
Driving Under My Influence (In Hypnovision)
Saturday Night Fever Blister
Hot Buttered Fingers
Talkin’ Dirty to the Dead
Abra-Cadaver
A Very Malcolm X-Mas

1978
Nanny Hooter’s Hootenanny
Recycled White Trash
World War III II
The Twin Ledgers of Justice
Aerobicaphobia
Gin Blossom Special
“Bang!” (There, I Said It)
Pong: The Movie
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Shuda, Wuda, Cuda
Fudge Factor
Strong, Hard and Chicano
That Rascally Mutt
Dying Kids
Cousin Bloodshot Buckshot
A Stiletto Affair
Buddy Cops V: Hayseed and Toughnut
Plumber’s Little Helper
Esperanto Girls
Baby Booty, Booty Baby
Where to, Brute?
Punks Vs. Jocks
We’re F.*.C.K.E.D.!

1979
Adolescent Sexopolis
Your Stepfather’s Mustache
Lover is a Five Letter Word
Hot Justice in Less than Thirty Minutes (Pizza Franchises as Heroes)
Disco Incantations
Uncle Tomboy
Dying Kids II: The Plague
Summer Bods (For Women)
Summer Bods (For Men)
Barnyard of Hate
Marry Me Heels
Buddy Cops VI: Milquetoast and Honey
Love Hears Everything
Fireball
Pigtails
Pants Full of Ambition
Keeping Secretions
Jungle Freaks
S-E-X! That Spells Sex!

1980
Hoary Old Truths and Truthful Old Whores
The Earth Movers
The Devil Needs a Drink
Asylum of Angels
Victoria’s Principles and Secrets
One Million Years A.D.
The Justice League of Superfreaks
The Love Bombardier
Dying Kids III: Schoolbus Full of Donor Hearts
The Bodacious Oasis
Buddy Cops VII: Flatfoot and Higheel
Did You Feel That?
Starring the Braless Cloggers
Andy Opia: Lazy Private Eye
Pencils Down!
Chunk of Change
Monster Truck Monster
He Bites!

1981
I See London, I See France
Casting Out Nines
Nazis of the Third Reich
Hooked on Classics: The Movie
A Tempting Fate
Solid Gold Dancer Murders
Alfpha and Omega and Pinky
The Ominous Attic
A Filthy Masquerade
Rock ‘n Roll Golem
Festering Destiny
The Despot Removers
Calamari
The Arouser
(Steam Rises At) The Hump Swamp
Throb
Trolling Stone Sober
Whale of a Cop
Nocturnal Suspicions

1982
Sick Gloria’s Transit
Sammy Davis Junior High
Don’t Pick at It
The Pagan Gladiators
Hello, Me!
Undercover Monk
The French Method
The Tender Gender Bender’s Agenda
Priapism Diary
Undulations
The Dirty-Minded Dozen
Death Toll: Turnpike of Destruction
Laughing Til I Hurt You
Joan of Arkansas
Large Angry Antennae
Wallets and Groins
U.F.O. Babes
Aromarama
The Mummy Blushes

1983
Psycho Vet III: Assignment Grenada
I Say!
Right to Live, Left to Die
The Pulverizer
Feelin’ Your First One
Madam Madman
Strong, Hard and Vietnamese
Muff
Two Humans
The Telltale Sheet
King Kong Christmas
Serrations
Foresaking No Others
Learn to Paint with Morty Fineman
Acupuncture Academy
Madam, I’m Adam
Pitbulls vs. Piranhas (Animated)
Which Way to the Money?
The Savage Rebel Savages
Heil, Titler!

1984
Christ for the Defense
Lottery of Doom
Shaft Canary
II Madam, I’m Adam II
Man in the Iron Lung, The
Stop it, You
Cannibalistic Missiles
The Rupture
Hip-Hopocratic Oaths
AKA Dickweed
Jazzercide
Two Humans II: The Humid Humus
A Lick and a Promise
Fistula
A Single Shard of Mercy
Philosophy of Desire
Acupuncture Academy II: Pointy, Pointy, Pointy
E. Teen
The Grounded Stewardesses
Sweet Sinews of Grief
You Killed My Partner, Now I Want Revenge
Cheerleader Camp Massacre

1985
Grounded Stewardesses II: Snowed in at Lake Tahoe
Lower Education
Camisole Man
Three Ho’ Punchout
Street Value of Seduction
The Long Tongue of Memory
Abrupt Reclosure
Ablation!
Blackout (Released in Europe as “Noir”)
Big Burning Boat
The Terrorarium
In the Eyes of the Apes
Arrows and Quivers
Get Down, Moses
The Mini-Computer Wore a Mini-Skirt

1986
Thong Monster
Akimbo Drumbeat
Teachers vs. Students
That’s General Psycho Vet to You!
Attack and Decay
Death’s Black Beemer
Aboriginal Sin
The Vile Turn-On
Dear God, No!
Perpetration
The Phantasy Cult
Thicker Than Blood
This Constipated Earth
Tactile Concentration
Heather, Tethered
Nude Cop
Grounded Stewardesses III: Mechanical Failure in Rio
Ten Million Ways to Die
Dreams, Wet and Arid
Celebrate for the Hell of It

1987
K-9 Bone Patrol
The Grammar of Longhair
1-900-TABOOOO
Twelve Angry Men and a Baby
Eden for Hedonists
Requiem for a Babysitter
Lascivious Neighborhood
Strong, Hard and Hmong
Geographical Bachelors
Grounded Stewardesses IV: Extended Layover in Miami
Large, Natural Laughs
To Hell in a Basket
Star Light and Coffee Black
Safeword Abductions
Trauma, Bwnt Trauma
The French (They are a Funny Race)
Planet Perverted

1988
The Heart is a Strong Muscle
Drive-By Drive-In
Elephant Walk
Searching for L’Ptetomaine
Love is the Right to Leave
I Do; Adieu
RoboHomo
Gladhand
Splattered Palate of Urges
The Moon’s White Torso
A Tube of Forgiveness
Rogue Mime, The Taoist Tatooist
Grounded Stewardess Christmas, A
Man With Two Things, The

1989
Telegasm
Dracula Lambada
B.F. DeeDee
I Smell London, I Smell France
Executrix
Temblor!
Insignificant Others
Sans-a-Belt Slackers
The Electrocutioner
Unnecessary Roughage
Perchance to Nightmare
Dead Cat Bounce
Thai Food Mary

1990
Supermodel Carnival
The Decapitators
Psycho Vet IV: Panama
That’s President Draft Dodger to You!
The Temptation game
Asphalt by Candelight
The Violet Catastrophie
Squall!
Compassion Fagigues
Herm-Aphrodite: God and Goddess of Love
Oh, Flagrant Fragrance! Oh, Pungent Ungent!
Tantric or Treat
The Uncensored History of Revealing Swimwear

1991
You’re Only Worth One Bullet
The Ignoble Calculations of Mme. F. and Her Pimp
Grounded Stewardess Reunion, A
Pomegranite: An Extended Metaphor
Desert Psycho Vet
Hollywood’s Private Personalized Plates
Aromatherapy Execution
My People are Naked
Song of the Pitiful
Vicissitudes of Wickedness
Fluff Pulp Babe
Supermodel Carnival II: Runway Runaways
Secrets the Mouth Won’t Tell

1992
Meal of Generation X
Def 2 Da Noiz
Draft Dodger Meets Psycho Vet
D.O.A. Hole
Obsessionary Income
Thrill Collector
Requesting Network Attention
First Lady Chatterly
Rap Riot
Supermodel Carnival III: Adam and Evil
The Whole of America

1993
Amateur Faces of Death
A Man and a Woman and a Deck of Cards
Psycho Vet Meets Hercules
Consortium and Loss
Duk ‘n’ Run
Two-Hand Solitare
Hot Squat
Uncle Sampire
Who Got the Soul Clap?

1994
Deep Bruise
Prickly Heat
The Sad Forehead in My Mirror
Large Bore Killers
Highest and Best Use

1995
Dessicant Sky
The Spanking Machine

1996
Learn to Paint with Morty Fineman
Learn to Cook with Morty Fineman
Learn to Make Love with Morty Fineman

1997
Arriverderci, Morty
Virtual Wife

1998
The Desert of Small Dreams
Tatoo II: Pierced by an Angel

2000
Ms. Kevorkian

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, 2000’s The Independent, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Before Mark Lester Gazed Into the Dismal Near-Future of Class of 1989 (1989), He Warned of the Much More Imminent Class of 1984 (1982)

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“Teachers sucks!”

If there were any doubt about our November Movie of the Month Swampchat’s assertion that the bizarre technofuture of Class of 1999 was born out of fear of escalating violence among Regan-era youths, you’d have to look no further than the original entry in Mark Lester’s Class of 19__” series. 1982’s Class of 1984 opens with the following warning: “Last year there were 280,000 incidents of violence by students against their teachers & classmates in our high schools. Unfortunately, this film is partially based on true events. Fortunately, very few schools are like Lincoln High . . . yet.” While Class of 1999 pushes the paranoid fear of bloodthirsty, sex-crazed youths to an absurd extreme crawling with cyborg teaching units & mind-melting future-drugs, Class of 1984 gives off a much more distinct feeling of believing its own bullshit. There’s an air of satire in the way Class of 1999 warns of future school systems having to function like high tech prisons in order to survive, while Class of 1984 plays much more like a grim warning of the moral cesspool our country is supposedly becoming as if it were originally conceived during an old curmudgeon’s drunken rant. In their depictions of a crime-ridden future gone to shit, Class of 1999 is the satirical Robocop to Class of 1984‘s heartfelt Death Wish.

Class of 1984 starts by depicting basic teen activities that already horrify parents: graffiti, marijuana use, the donning of leather jackets & *gasp* mini-skirts, etc. The transgressions obviously escalate from there, as the movie goes on to depict an absurdly organized network of gang violence & drug trade, one that eventually includes casual instances of rape & murder. I’m not sure that there’s a single trace of irony or satire in Class of 1984. Its depiction of school systems as surveillance-state prisons & the edict that “Teaching is something you do in spite of everything else” plays as entirely justified, serving as a wake up call in case parents (rightfully) believe that the state of things actually isn’t all that bad. In Class of 1999, teachers are ultra-violent & ultimately in the wrong. In Class of 1984, they’re victims to the rapid teen menace supposedly ruining this country.

Even though Class of 1999 is more of an exaggerated cartoon than its 1982 predecessor, I find that it reads as a much more level-headed & nuanced exploration of the ridiculousness of paranoid fears about out-of-control teens, whether its satirical camp was entirely intentional or not. Class of 1984, on the other hand, is too straight-forward to be read as anything but a conservative nightmare brought to life. It’s essentially the epitome of 80s & 90s inner-city-teachers-in-crisis movies like Dangerous Minds & Lean on Me brought to their most ridiculous extreme. The two films do share a lot of similarities in their details, including unanswered questions about why the teens choose to go to school in the first place, the use of “suburbanite” as an insult, depictions of beyond-rowdy punk concerts, and a climactic, after-hours gauntlet in a high school’s hallways that results in a body count. They even share a performance by Roddy McDowell, but it’s difficult to say if the continuity of his character makes total sense between them. Class of 1984 stands as the more grotesque of the pair, though, extensively fulfilling the rape only threatened in Class of 1999 & depicting the kids as bored, rich teen sadists instead of criminals born of an economic system that left them behind.

With contributions from Big Names like Alison Cooper & a baby-faced Michael J. Fox, Class of 1984 isn’t exactly a dismissible trifle, but it is significantly less . . . classy in its politics than its absurd sci-fi sequel. Thanks to the thoroughly pointless Class of 1999 II: The Substitute it can’t be said that Class of 1984 is the worst of the Mark Lester trilogy, but it was surely outdone by its 1989 sequel. It’s an interesting film, a grotesque insight into conservative paranoia in the Reagan era, but that distinction is not nearly as exciting or unique as the campy Terminator-knockoff shenanigans of the film that followed.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, 1989’s Class of 1999, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at the diminished returns depths of its shoddy sequel, and this glimpse of its unlikely Australian counterpart, Future Schlock.

-Brandon Ledet

Australia Had Its Own Class of 1999 (1989) in Future Schlock (1984)

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Five years before our November Movie of the Month, Class of 1999, was released in America, Future Schlock, a similarly-minded low-budget dystopian fantasy film, was released in Australia. Class of 1999 is far superior to Future Schlock in terms of quality & cultural shelf-life, but its all too easy to see echoes of the near-future class politics of 1999 in its Australian new wave punk predecessor. Both films only managed to recoup half of their respective budgets in their lackluster theater runs, but there’s no denying that Class of 1999‘s $5 million price tag afforded it a generous head start that Future Schlock‘s comparatively minuscule $½ million couldn’t compete with. That may account for a lot of Class of 1999‘s staying power in terms of cult classic potential, but there’s plenty of fascinating, shabby ideas at play in Future Schlock that make for an interesting watch, however flawed, especially when you’re coming fresh from Class of 1999‘s similarly-oriented dystopian charms.

Class of 1999 predicts a ten-years-down-the-line cyberfuture in which unruly Reagan-era youth have become such a menace that entire sectors of Seattle have been ceded to them in order to protect the law-abiding adults that live in surrounding suburban areas. Future Schlock looks slightly further into the future, say 15 years, warning of The Middle Class Revolt of 1990 that leaves Melbourne legally segregated by oppressively rigid class lines. Similarly inspired by the fallout of Reaganomics, Future Schlock forecasts a period of class stasis after the revolt in which upward mobility has been eliminated & suburban mediocrity is mandatory by law. Much like the walled-in, teen-run free fire zones of Class of 1999, Melbourne’s working class community is imprisoned in an inner-city ghetto where police beatings are not only routine, but officially encouraged and the ruling middle class suburbanites visit to gawk, as if entertained by animals in a zoo. As bleak as all that sounds, there’s actually a great deal of irreverent comedy that overpowers any of the film’s doomsaying politics, the same as it does in the much superior Class of 1999.

Part of what feels so off about Future Schlock‘s quality as a finished product is that its central narrative is decidedly loose. Class of 1999 tells a clear story about rival teen gangs, The Razorheads & The Blackhearts, banding together to destroy their murderous teacherbots (or “tactical education units”) in order to prevent their impending mutual demise. Future Schlock is more of a chaotic collection of comedic sketches meant to flesh out the film’s central, high-concept premise, held together as a single story only by a documentary-style narration track. In the worst of the film’s segments a pair of violent police officers track down infamous, ghetto-imprisoned bandits with the aliases Cisco Kid & Sancho Panza. The cops are belittled for being fruitcakes & pansies in an unwelcome reminder of just how ultra-macho & backwards the 1980s could be, apparently even in the era’s punk rock cinema. Slightly better are segments that follow Cisco Kid & Sancho Panza’s true selves, Sarah & Bear, a pair of new wave punk performance artists who perform songs with lyrics like “Everybody, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em, everyone,” nightly in a ghetto cabaret. As their bandit alter-egos, Sarah & Bear go undercover to freak out the milquetoast suburban normals, but they’re honestly much more interesting when they’re performing synth pop songs of protest to drunken, ghetto revelers as the crowd cheers loudly, performs public cunnilingus, and just generally establishes that their sloppy punk ways are more far more enticing than the dull tidiness of middle class suburbia.

The problem is that we don’t see nearly enough of that middle class mediocrity to draw a proper distinction between that world & the punk ghetto alternative. Much like with Class of 1999, a lot of Future Schlock‘s best moments happen in the classroom, where the film establishes how its laws of mandatory conformity, detailed in “The Standard Set of Middle Class Guidelines” are passed down to the brainwashed youth. Of course, the youth in Future Schlock are much more docile & subdued than the machine gun-wielding teens in Class of 1999, but the way their education system is set up to break their spirits & dull their personalities is very similar in tactic. Honestly, I just wish there was more of that perspective of what a mandatory milquetoast society would be like. There wasn’t much insight into how the suburban areas outside of Class of 1999‘s teen-run free fire zones would operate on a daily basis, but I assumed they hadn’t changed too much since the youngster takeover, so that wasn’t too big of a deal. In Future Schlock, on the other hand, a lot of time wasted on the peculiarities of Sarah & Bear’s sexual habits & homophobic humor aimed at the ghetto’s abusive cops could’ve been pointed at exploring what suburban Melbourne would look like in this particular, dystopian future after The Middle Class Revolt of 1990.

Ultimately, it doesn’t make too much sense at this point to complain about how much better Future Schlock could’ve been with a bigger budget & some thematic tweaking. The film is more or less inconsequential in its current, forgotten state, of interest only for fleeting moments of absurd brilliance & for its context in terms of how it relates to Class of 1999, which I will vehemently contend deserves more traction as a cult classic than it gets. In the spirit of celebrating Future Schlock‘s highlights instead of mulling over its obvious flaws, I’m going to conclude this piece with a transcription one of the film’s best moments: a revised Australian national anthem, updated for the nightmarish suburban middle class state detailed in the film’s opening classroom scene. Along with Sarah & Bear’s aforementioned “Fuck ’em” anthem, it’s a moment that shines as a standalone piece of high art, one that almost justifies the rest of the film’s wasted potential:

“Australia’s sons, let us rejoice, for we are middle class. We’ve golden soil and sun tan oil. Our home is girt by grass. Our land is drowned in swimming pools. The barbie’s over there. The Carlton Light and cask of white are in the frigidaire. A pie and sauce, a winning horse. T.V. and easy chair. Australia’s homes are brick veneer. We own a Betamax. We’ve Commodores and sliding doors. We cheat a bit on tax. A microwave and Magimix. A dishwasher as well. We’re good at golf. Three cheers for Rolf! We’re in the R.S.L. At Christmas time we choose our gifts from Myers and K-Tel. Of course, we all like Chinese food and own a caravan. Electrolux and flying ducks. A non-stick frying pan. K-Mart’s our fashion saving place. The shopping mall’s our shrine. Our homes are clean. We drink Ben Ean while watching channel 9. I’m sure the neighbours would approve. Their taste’s the same as mine.”

Beautiful stuff. Brings a tear to my suburban eye.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, 1989’s Class of 1999, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & our look at the diminished returns depths of its shoddy sequel.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Class of 1999 (1989)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Britnee, Brandon and Erin watch Class of 1999 (1989).

Boomer: Class of 1999 is a strange little movie. For readers who haven’t had the pleasure, the film is set in the titular year, less than a full decade after its release date. In this “distant” future, inter-gang violence has become so overwhelming that the areas around high schools have become dystopian free fire zones, but these violent, Mad Maxian teenagers still submit to going to campus every day for some reason. The movie’s protagonist, Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg), is a former gangmember paroled and returned to school. Unbeknownst to the student body, the principal (Malcolm McDowell) has agreed to allow an obviously mad roboticist (Stacy Keach) to install three former military androids (Patrick Kilpatrick, John P. Ryan, and goddess on this earth Pam Grier), “reprogrammed” as educators, as new instructors. Culp tries to stay out of trouble, but his narrative arc is complicated by his romance with the principal’s daughter (Tracy Lind). The androids decide that the best way to create a stable educational environment is to rid the school of violence by creating a war between the two rival gangs, even drawing in Culp due to the false flag death of his brother (Joshua John Miller, who was also the annoying kid brother in Teen Witch). As you would expect, this culminates in the two gangs putting aside their differences to defeat the Terminator. I mean the teachers.

I love this movie. It’s a perfect encapsulation of worst case, slippery slope thinking with regards to teen violence, a misplaced jeremiad warning of dark days to come–won’t someone please, please think of the children? Bradley Gregg, star of many of my adolescent fantasies (and one of the dream warriors from Nightmare on Elm Street 3), parades around in an outfit that manages to be both utterly ridiculous and strangely sexy, featuring skin-tight leather pants emblazoned with the word “war” over and over again and a form-fitting tee under an oversized babydoll jacket. He has nothing on Keach, of course, who struts around in this film with a platinum ponytail and matching (painful looking) contact lenses, while still somehow managing to play this ludicrous role as straight as possible. Throw in the other stars in the cast, like Grier and McDowell, and it’s a surprise that this Terminator ripoff made barely half of its relatively low budget back in ticket sales.

The Keach/Culp dichotomy of seriousness and campiness is one of my favorite things about Class. On the one hand, the film features ridiculous gang warfare with oversized vehicles in one scene, followed by dark domestic trouble in the form of Angel and Cody’s mother’s truly frightening drug addiction in the next (before she completely disappears from the film). Somehow, this intermix works for me, although I can admit it probably shouldn’t. What do you think, Britnee? Is this tonal inconsistency a drawback, or a feature?

Britnee: I think the mix of the film’s outlandish features and serious moments made Class the unique and unforgettable film that it is. If anything, the serious moments of the film, such as the mother and son drug brawl, amplified the film’s campiness, and that’s always a good thing. When serious, dramatic situations are placed in such a ridiculous setting (post-apocalyptic 1999), they bring out this sick and twisted type of humor that makes us all think, “I really shouldn’t be laughing at this.” Being able to successfully pull off this type of humor and create such an uncomfortable mix of emotions is the greatest achievement that a film can accomplish. Unfortunately, Class did not have as many of those wonderful Lifetime movie-like moments as I hoped for, but I think that may be the only complaint I have about the film. It was that good.

Something that I just can’t stop thinking about from Class is the gang warfare between the Blackhearts and the Razorheads. The film’s street gangs are made out to seem like these awful groups of mixed-up teens who will never escape their miserable, violent lifestyle, but under their rough and tough exterior, they’re just a bunch of kids searching for a little bit of love and understanding. This really comes through when the Blackhearts and Razorheads stop killing each other and team up to fight the evil robotic teachers. The bad guys (Razorheads) join the not-as-bad guys (Blackhearts) and ultimately become the good guys. At this point, the gang lifestyle actually seems more acceptable and becomes a little appealing. I mean, if I was stuck in some crazy life-or-death situation where I was forced to join a gang, I would definitely let the Blackhearts jump me in. 80’s new wave couture, Nine Inch Nails dance parties with machine guns, and a gnarly black heart tattoo are enough to win me over.

Erin, what are your thoughts on the two opposing gangs joining forces to fight the evil robotic teachers? Was this one of the few heartwarming parts of the film? Or is it just another cheesy moment to add to the list?

Erin: I thoroughly enjoyed the Class of 1999 experience . . . but I’m not sure that I found the gangs joining forces to be terribly heartwarming.  I think that if they hadn’t been in an automatic-weapon fueled fire-fight, I might be with you.  Had they been engaged in an old fashioned fist-fight-style rumble, I think that I would be more sympathetic to their situation.  As it was, it seemed like the gang side of The Warriors and the terrorist robot side of The Terminator got together and forgot to bring a side helping of the humanity from The Outsiders (I’ll take 1980s movie title conventions for $500, Alex).

I think that Class of 1999 is trying to communicate a series of relationships to the viewers: the difference between the viewers and the post-apocalyptic kids,  the difference between the rival gangs, and the difference between all of the kids and the inhuman robots.  I think that the movie does a great job showing us the first relationship, but stumbles with the second two.  The gangland teens are pretty reprehensible, truly living up to the premise of the movie that youth gangs have turned American urban centers into warzones.  The movie makes a very clear break from reality with its set up and presentation of the its own world.

Cody is really the best glimmer of humanity out of the entire movie, in my opinion.  He’s the only example of a multi-dimensional character, with his dark side trying to survive in a gangland and his sweet side of falling in love with a certified Nice Girl.  We don’t get that multi-dimensionality from other members of the Blackhearts, much less from the punks in the Razorheads.  It’s really hard to root for any of them.  Perhaps Cody is supposed to stand out as the Last Sane Man?

In any case, it’s hard for me to see myself in the gang members as they make a stand against the Teachernators.  Yes, they’re scrappy kids coming together to take on psychotic military robots, but minutes earlier they were trying to kill each other with machine guns! On the other hand, the Roboteachers are out-of-their-minds inhuman, which is made evident early in the movie by their behaviors and later in the movie by their physical transformations into walking weapons.

What do you think, Brandon, does Class of 1999 struggle to humanize the human characters?  Is there a clear enough difference between the terrible actions taken by the gangs and the Teachbots?  Does the audience get an avatar to insert themselves into the movie, or are we just supposed to watch the carnage?

Brandon: Simply by the nature of what it’s trying to portray, I totally have to agree that all basic humanity has been stripped from this movie’s ultraviolent teens. Cartoonishly over-exaggerating adult fears about out of control young adult behavior, Class of 1999 poses a grim, larger than life portrait of teen rebellion that is far beyond anything you’d expect to see in any conceivable human being, young or not, even in a worst case scenario, ten years down the road cyberfuture. Yeah, teens can be perilously obsessive over getting their hands on drugs, beers, sex, and cool cars at times, but usually not in the way Class of 1999‘s teens mix those simple pleasures with guns, bombs, landmines, and missile launchers. The first half or so of the film plays like a particularly paranoid parent’s warped nightmare about what their teen is up to while they’re out with their bonehead friends. A great example of this is the warehouse concert scene. I’ve been to quite a few concerts in my time & while many may have involved industrial music dance parties, I can’t remember ever witnessing a gang beating in the moshpit, machine gun fire set off to the rhythm of the songs being played, or the venue being lit by carefully placed barrel fires. I’m sure that as my parents first let me out of the house to experience live music for the first time, however, their worst fears of what was going on weren’t too far off from that image.

The trick here is that Class of 1999 is smart to spoof both sides of the teen rebellion coin. Because teens are perceived as such violent, out of control animals, authority figures take an automatically adversarial position against them. Late in the film when Principal Malcom McDowell complains about his army of roboteachers, saying, “They’re waging war with my students!”, he’s met with the response, “Isn’t that what all teachers do?” If the film indeed has any specific sort of point it’s trying to make & we’re not supposed to just, as Erin suggests, sit back & “watch the carnage”, I think it’s to be found somewhere in that exchange. Even if real life teens are as bad as portrayed in this film (they’re not), they’re still far more sympathetic than the (robotic) adults that brutally murder them by snapping their necks or forcefeeding them glass vials of superdrugs. There’s an oppressive, prison-like atmosphere in the film’s educational system (complete with “RESPECT”, “OBEY”, “LEARN” commands that could’ve been directly lifted from John Carpenter’s They Live) that feels like a direct indictment of privatized, militarized schooling that treats kids like violent threats instead of young, eager minds. The cyberfuturism of Class of 1999‘s killer robot “tactical education units” may not be readily recognizable in today’s flesh-bound educational units (public school teachers), but they do feel like a blown-up, exaggerated version of the way we systematically tend to treat children as a threat & a nuisance.

Boomer, how much do you think Class of 1999 is a movie of its time? Do you think that there’s a bit of historical, late 80s gang violence context here that would drastically change if there were to be a Class of 2025 released in 2015? Or would the same basic adult fears of teen rebellion & a privatized, militaristic educational system be eligible for lampooning today (with CGI bloodsplatter unfortunately subbed for the practical effects gore, of course)?

Boomer: One of the great truths about western culture is that each generation that reaches the level of becoming “the establishment” seeks out and pontificates about the fatal flaws in the generation that follows. This is nothing new; adults of today are “concerned” about the isolating effects of handheld devices, just as my parents were “concerned” about the isolating effects of the Discman, or their forebears were concerned about the invention of this thing or that thing, going back to concerns that the invention of the phonograph would lead to fewer people being interested in learning to play instruments. There are a lot of sociological and anthropological reasons for this, but most of it boils down to the universal constant that we will only get older, coupled with the fear of obsolescence and fear-mongering about “the youth,” and treating them, as Brandon notes, as a threat or nuisance.

The other major factor in the genesis of 1999 is that the late eighties and early nineties saw a very visible rise in gang violence, something that couldn’t simply be dismissed, so the news media had to address it. However, the “establishment” couldn’t acknowledge that disenfranchised people turn to crime because of systemic problems related to class and privilege, especially not when people were basically walking down the street accidentally poking others with their raging pro-wealth Reaganomics hard-ons. As a result, the majority of Americans, ignorant of the real causes of gang violence and its apparent meteoric rise, had nothing to cling to but their filtered and incorrect understanding of social problems, reinforced by the cyclical nature of youth-blaming.

What’s so interesting to me is how 1999 manages to be both an indictment of that mindset and the apotheosis of it at the same time, and, although I may be giving it too much credit here, I think that this is intentional. The darkness that permeates Culp’s world represents all the things that the parents of 1989 feared about the future, a horribly violent place where those nasty (scary) teenagers with their loud music and their dirty fingernails rule over a scorched suburbia because no one took a stand against teenage skullduggery when there was a chance! But it also holds up a mirror to that absurd frame of mind, pointing out the flaws in that kind of fearful, conservative nightmare by showing how unrealistic and silly such a future would be. Also, there are killer robots, because who doesn’t love that? And, if your kids are running around doing drugs, they probably learned it from watching you, mom or dad!

So, the answer is “yes,” 1999 is a very much a product of its time and of the politico-cultural environment from which it sprung, and there would have to be significant updates to remake this movie, although I could see how it could be done in a couple of different ways, depending upon which of Joann and Cletus’s fears you wish to highlight and mock. Political correctness is often a good place for conservative muckrakers to stir up some passion: “In the future world of 2025, schools no longer teach facts, they teach feelings. They no longer teach science, they teach sensitivity. And they only teach the ‘corrected’ version of history.” And, like, instead of robot teachers, there’s an AI that seeks to “purge” students of their hopefulness or individuality or whatever by teaching them about all of American history, atrocity alongside progress, and by teaching them self-control and tolerance. Cody Culp would be a secret bigot who teaches his androgynous and sexless peers, long having been made soft of mind by those damn SJWs, to fight back against the machine of liberal indoctrination by being politically incorrect and proud, or whatever. To be honest, though, I don’t know that this would be recognized as a satirical interpretation of a conservative’s nightmare of the future; it would be more likely to be seen as a prescient vision of a world to come, ruled by the “libtard.” Or maybe I’m just on a tangent; who knows.

The real truth is this: the way education is enforced in the west is not the best method for schooling, and we all pretty much know that. The priorities are all skewed, and the eight-hour, rigidly-structured schoolday that has been the model for a long time isn’t based on the best pedagogical or psychoeducational practices but on the model of a workday; it forcibly instills in children a willingness to accept the drudgeries of pyramid capitalism, essentially, rather than encouraging critical thought, technical acumen, interest in knowledge for its own sake, or any kind of prioritization of variety in educational forms. You can see that small changes are taking place today, but for the worse; as an educator, I toured a new charter school just a year or two ago that was filled with classrooms that didn’t look like classrooms. They looked like call centers. So even if Class of 2025 were to be made in the way that I poorly pitched above, a Republican nightmare of social justice gone mad, it would still be nothing like the schools of the future, just as my school in 1999 was not a war zone of apocalyptic proportions.

Britnee: What do you think about a Class of 2025? Does your conception of what Class of 1999‘s thesis was differ from mine, and if so, how do you think your interpretation would be updated for a contemporary audience?

Britnee: When watching Class of 1999, I did realize that there was a connection to the large amount of youth gang violence occurring around the time the film was released, but I really didn’t think much of it. I saw the film as being loads of stupid fun without much depth, but your perspective really got me thinking about the whole “youth-blaming” and “conservative nightmare” aspects that the film definitely illustrates. Loud music, fast cars, leather jackets, heavy eyeliner, and funky haircuts were a conservative parent’s nightmare in the late 80s/early 90s, and the teens in 1999 are an explosion of this stereotypical degenerate youth. The whole film actually reminds me of a lost Billy Idol music video. It’s just so “Rebel Yell.” These types of teens were going to cause the world to become a post-apocalyptic cesspool of crime, violence, and pure filth. Unfortunately, the world did not become that exciting by 1999. There were many changes that occurred within those short 10 years, but at the same time, much remained the same.

Now, to think of what my interpretation of 1999 would be for a contemporary audience. 1999 did play on the fear of what the future would be like for the youth of that time, and now it seems as though one of the biggest fears for today’s youth is the lack of importance placed on quality education. A modern 1999, or as Boomer stated, 2025, would deal with the absence of general education and the emphasis on some sort of super strict social class-based structure. Children will be sorted into military, white-collar, or blue-collar positions at birth, like in the movie Antz when newborn ants are assigned to be workers and soldiers. Who knew that such a horrible movie would be so insightful? Each group would have their separate type of school, but they would be more like training academies. Only the elite would receive a quality education, and they would use it to coerce obedience and conformity on the youth. Those that do not have elite status would live in squalor and have all sorts of chemicals in the air and water that dope them up, making them ultra submissive to authority. I feel as though the teen rebellion wouldn’t be as violent as one would expect. They would rely more on outsmarting the authority and only shooting them up from time to time instead of a constant machine gun blowout like in 1999. At this point, weapons would probably have lasers instead of bullets, so the battle scenes would be a little more on the calm side.

Erin, speaking of weapons, did you think that it was strange that the weapons in 1999 weren’t very futuristic? Come to think of it, not much was futuriscitc about this film that was set in the future. Is the budget to blame for this or is it something bigger?

Erin :  Britnee, someone remarked during our viewing of Class of 1999 “Oh no!  They didn’t invent cell phones in the future!” as two characters were forced into a situation with no way of contacting each other.

In some ways, yes, I think that budget has something to do with why the weapons and other parts of the film weren’t very futuristic.  Clearly, the bulk of the effects budget went to the Teachbots and their final set-chewing rampage.  Honestly, I think the bulk of the general budget may have gone to that last scene.

In other ways, I think that a few things inhibited Class of 1999‘s presentation of the future.  First of all, it could make logical sense that the teen gangs in the movie only have access to older, out of date technology and weapons. Teens in 1999 might have had pagers, but in my community were only on the cusp of common cellphone ownership.   Admittedly, this theory falls apart a little in the way that the administrators are not seen using futuristic technology either.

Secondly,  one of the difficulties of setting a movie in the near future is hitting the right pitch for technological advancement.  I think that the rapid development of computer and internet culture, where even impoverished  families have internet access and at least one computer, and the ubiquity of personal electronics such PDAs and cellphones might have been impossible to see from late 1980s.  From where we stand, it seems obvious and inevitable that the future would look like it does (or did, in 1999).  For the writers and audiences at the time, that might have seemed as outlandish as Star Trek’s communicators and tricorders.

And thirdly (and most likely, I think), placing Class of 1999 in the near future is a nice way to hand wave away the complete ridiculousness of the world that the movie inhabits.  The future setting means that the filmmakers have to take much less responsibility for portraying any kind of real life anything, from the physical sets to the interactions of the characters.  Honestly, I think that’s a sloppy use of what can be an effective story-telling tool.  Science Fiction as a genre is also used as a means of giving us the distance needed from reality to discuss difficult issues.  By setting Class of 1999 in the future, the filmmakers were able to explore both the dual fear of out-of-control youth and out-of-control education institutions with removal from the actual educational landscape of 1989-90. (I’ll insert here that I think Class of 1999 is more a fantasy rather than a proper Science Fiction movie.)

The unreality of the movie not withstanding, there are some moments that resonated with me as “real”.  When Cody’s mother and brother fight over drugs, I was reminded that the late 80s had seen crack cocaine strike urban areas like an epidemic.  Many cities were still suffering from botched urban renewal plans and the hemorrhagic flow of residents to suburbs.

What do you think, Brandon, where do you see realism in this movie?  Is searching for reality even relevant?

Brandon: I feel like we’ve already run through a great deal of the film’s startling realism here: the cultural context of 80s gang violence (as portrayed in the media); the broken, unnecessarily adversarial education system; the shocking jolts of harrowing drug addiction & attempted sexual assault that break up the fun, etc. Something that does stand out to me, though, is the budding romantic relationship between our beloved teen protagonists Cody & Traci. Okay, it’s a little ridiculous that that the movie made time for a romantic subplot in the midst of battle droid educational units liberally murdering teenagers in the guise of discipline, but it’s also a somewhat believable ridiculousness. If you combine already heightened teenage libidos with the kind of tumultuous situations that naturally tend to bring people together (say, your gym teacher removing his arm to reveal a subdermal rocket launcher, for instance) it’s only logical that a romantic bond or two will arise. Thankfully, the one delivered here is accompanied with such great exchanges as Cody coolly responding to the question “You gonna call me or what?” with “Yeah. Both.” and hilariously teasing Traci to “Open up those suburban eyes” to the danger they’re facing. I’ll make no guesses as to how realistic that exact dialogue is, but the situation is at the very least more believable than an army of robotic teachers that get away with viciously spanking (not to mention disembowling & setting aflame) their students with out so much as a peep from the PTA.

Lagniappe

Erin: The least believable part of this whole movie is that these kids are still showing up for school.  With the exception of Cody’s probation requirement, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to show up. Why?  Why are they there?

Britnee: Of all the strange yet amazing moments in Class of 1999, the one that I just can’t forget is when Mr. Hardin (John P. Ryan) exposes his claw machine hand for the first time. As he sinks his creepy claw into the skull of an unfortunate teen, he says one of the greatest lines in the film: “I love to mold young minds.” Those obnoxious arcade toy machines will never be the same!

Brandon: One of the oddest details in a movie where they’re in no short supply are the ordinary objects of a banana & glass of milk. Character actor Stacy Keach does an excellent job of chewing scenery as the evil “Megatech robotics specialist” Dr. Robert Forrest, who provides the technology for the evil teacherbots. He gets obvious perverse pleasure from watching his creations discipline their students (which is especially alarming during one particular robospanking), deriving even greater joy when their “discipline” escalates to murder, and he just generally looks like an evil lab rat that killed so many other lab rats that he was honorarily dubbed a scientist because people were afraid to put him down. What I love most about Dr. Forrest, who is an all around great villain, is that on top of these unwholesome characteristics, he seems to enjoy incongruously wholesome snacks. Watching someone so evil & so fake-looking casually chew on a banana & gulp a glass of milk is a hilarious, unsettling sight gag that beautifully complicates his character in a way that’s almost too good to have been scripted. I like to imagine that Keach came up with his own onscreen snack regimen himself, insisting on enjoying his milk & his banana (surely obtained from craft services) on camera in order to give his character a whole other layer of perversity. No matter whose idea it was, though, it totally worked & after the movie I ended up thinking just as much about those snacks as I did about the film’s roboviolence, which is really saying something.

Boomer: The DVD for this movie is as light on special features as you would expect for a niche-but-not-quite-cult classic film such as this, but it amuses me that the DVD cover foregoes the Terminator-esque cover of the VHS in favor of an image that looks like Shaq in Steel. Almost every trailer on the disc, however, is for some film that echoes Terminator in some way, however, which is good enough. Also, nothing tells you more about the film-makers’ misconception of the teaching profession than Traci’s comment that women never buy just a sexy bra or pair of panties, that they treat themselves. Because teachers make soooo much money with which to treat themselves, am I right? That’s why I’m still a teacher–no, wait, I quit because even working a second job didn’t net enough to get by on. Sorry, Traci, not all of our academically employed fathers are getting grant money from crazed scientists.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Brandon presents The Independent (2000)
January: The Best of 2015

-The Swampflix Crew