John Flynn's 1970's Films: Now Twice as Less MIA on DVD than ever before!

One of my very first posts (number 7 to be exact) was a brief eulogy for John Flynn, a director who specialized in crime thrillers. At the time I wondered why his much revered transcendent exploitation classic Rolling Thunder was still unreleased on DVD. We’ll over three and a half years later and after popping up in High Def on several cable stations as in addition to being well traded on the grey market, Rolling Thunder will finally make its official debut appearance on the digital platform next month via an MGM burn on request endeavor similar to the Warner Archive series.

As happy as this news is, I can’t help but feel this release is a little anticlimactic. Here is a film that has become a staple amongst a certain sect of 1970’s/1980’s genre cinephiles (for naught was it one of the first films covered by the Gentleman’s Guide to Midnite Cinema podcast), most of whom, similar to myself own either a good quality grey market bootleg or have it in their DVRs. Considering it’s rabid fan base, which includes Quentin Tarantino, this release, welcome as it is, is a bit of a disappointment. If I was operating a DVD company with the rights to Rolling Thunder (and hey, I am employable!), these are the special features I would include on the disc:

-Audio commentary with Quentin Tarantino and co-star Tommy Lee Jones (While Tarantino has never provided a commentary for one of his own films, he’s shown up on multiple commentaries for films he’s produced or is a fan of. It would be a hoot to have him and Jones, who made one of his earliest and most distinct impressions here, and has become a director in his own right, team up.)

--Conversation between Tarantino and screenwriter Paul Schrader. (As vocal in his support as Tarantino has been, screenwriter Schrader has been equally vocal in his dissent over changes made by the production company and director Flynn to his original script of Rolling Thunder. It would be interesting to see the results when these two very opinionated and very expressive personalities debate the merits or perceived lack thereof of the film)

--Making of documentary (A feature chronicling the making, release, and growth in reputation of Rolling Thunder featuring stars William Devane, James Best (aka Roscoe P. Coltrane), Jones, and Linda Haynes. As well as various members of the crew)

--Career Retrospective: John Flynn (While never considered an auteur, he’s had a solid career as a craftsman of action thrillers starring such disparate actors as James Woods, Sylvester Stallone, Robert Duvall and Steven Seagal)

--Original script: Paul Schrader’s Rolling Thunder (similar to the original Taxi Driver DVD which featured a readable version of the script, it would be a very interesting exercise to read the script that Schrader felt was misrepresented in the final product. Especially knowing that the original draft featured an appearance from Travis Bickle!)

--Original theatrical trailer (because, c’mon…)

But that’s not all folks, the aforementioned Warner Archives are doing a solid and releasing another 1970’s Flynn directed thriller, The Outfit.

Based on the Parker novels penned by Donald Westlake (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), but adapted loosely enough from the source material as to remove any sign that it’s the third book of a series, Robert Duvall stars as Macklin (the name Parker was never used in any of the adaptations) who seeks retribution for his brother’s murder by hitting the crime organization responsible in the wallet and then the gut. Flynn doesn’t attempt to mimic the most famous Parker novel cinematic adaptation, John Boorman’s Point Blank, audacious visual and editing style, instead he employs a more straightforward narrative with solemn undertones and a muted palette.

Turner Classic Movies has aired The Outfit a couple of times over the last few years (I finally caught it this year), but the print was non-anamorphic and worn. Warner Archives’s print restores its aspect ratio and is available to purchase now. Now we only need a release of the Jim Brown starring Parker adaptation, The Split, which I wrote about here.

By the way, rumor has it that Warner Archives is having a 5 movies for $50 deal this weekend, starting tomorrow, great for cinema lovers, horrible for my Quixotic Foibles goal.

Under New Management

With the Norman Bates saga effectively concluded (or at least seemingly) with Bates’ return to institutionalization at the end of Psycho III, Universal decided to take the Psycho series to television bringing only the original film and the famous locales along. Riding a wave of a nostalgic return to genre anthology series, by this point the Steven Spielberg produced Amazing Stories was on the air as were new incarnations of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone and other franchises such as Friday the 13^th (in name only) and A Nightmare on Elm Street were in the works, writer-director Richard Rothstein, who had written and produced the HBO anthology series The Hitch-Hiker, was tasked with using the infamous house and hotel for what was formulated to be a weekly series focusing on the strange occurrences surrounding guests of the Bates Motel. A two-hour pilot was commissioned focusing on the new owner and the renovation as well as an incident that would also serve as a template for future episodes. NBC did not pick up the series and instead ran the pilot as a movie of the week on July 5^th, 1987.

Completely eschewing the events of both sequels, Bates Motel introduces us to Alex West played by the perpetually youthful (the guy looked like he aged about 5 years between this and 1971’s Harold and Maude) and nervous Bud Cort, who as a child murdered his abusive step-father. In the sanitarium a kindly doctor (Robert Picardo) teams the troubled soul with Norman Bates, another youthful and nervous patient (played by Anthony Perkins’ stand-in on the first three films Kurt Paul) and they form a tight bond that provides redemption for Bates and a positive father figure for Alex. After Bates dies he bequeaths his inheritance, the Bates house and motel to Alex who moves to the town of Fruitvale after being declared sane and in tribute to his deceased friend restores it. But as the motel is going through its renovation spooky arbiters of potential doom begin happening: the skeletons of the paternal Bates appear, the vacancy sign turns on and off by itself and a familiar silhouette beings popping up. Is the house haunted by spirits angry that West is starting a new legacy? Or do they just really hate the new gaudy Southwestern décor? Or perhaps there’s some reasonable explanation that will reveal the work of someone who ain’t a fan of no meddling kids a la Scooby Doo? Furthermore, what happens to the first guest, a suicidal middle aged woman (Kerrie Keane), to stay at the new Bates Motel?

As you can probably surmise by the complicated plot summary, one of the major problems with Rothstein’s film is that it tries to be too much coupled with a lack of any sense of tone. When a filmmaker can mix disparate styles and moods seamlessly, it’s a thing of beauty. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, and hey, Alfred Hitchcock are some of the filmmakers that come immediately to my mind as being particularly adept at combining suspense, comedy, drama, violence, or what have you. Rothstein is nowhere near them. So the humor is met with a thud, it’s never really scary or suspenseful and when attempts are made at ethereal experiences, it’s just confusing since they function as a supposed guidance to one character, but are visible and active in the real world as well.

The fatal flaw though is the fumbled manner in which Rothstein attempts to shoehorn the suicidal woman’s storyline with the rest of the arc. After about one hour of the ninety minutes long show (that’s the length sans commercial), the story then focuses on the woman as she meets specters of teenage suicide victims (which includes Khrystyne Haje, Simone from Head of the Class, and Jason Bateman); besides confusing matters when these alleged spirits also interact with the hotel operators, the main problem is it becomes the focus of the story for 20 minutes completely ignoring the West storyline until it’s finally brought back for the final ten minutes. I realize the function of an anthology series is that each week a new character is introduced, but here the narrative flow is completely ruined. And speaking of the resolution to the Alex West storyline which I hinted at a few paragraphs above, for a film that eradicates Psycho II from existence, it sure is okay stealing that film’s major storyline of whether Mother has returned or someone with cruel intent is mimicking her to scare the unsteady protagonist.

Bates Motel is very much a mid-1980s TV movie of the week, so it’s hard to hold director Richard Rothstein to the standards of Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Franklin, or even Tony Perkins, but his inability to balance tone and the strange narrative late turn reflect poorly on the enterprise. The style of the Bates Motel, including the awful remodel, look nothing like the original film. I thought one of Psycho II’s strength was the production design and art direction that did a wonderful job of establishing the transition of the Bates house and motel into color. Bud Cort and Clark Gregg are solid if unspectacular in roles that conform to their strengths so much that little effort was probably involved. Lori Petty as the overall perky tomboy, who may have been West’s love interest if the show went to series, is grating, but I am willing to accept that’s due more to the written character than to Petty’s performance.

Bates Motel received middling ratings and evaporated from the public consciousness (I had actually recorded and watched it on VHS back in 1987—the height of my Psycho love--but completely forgot of its existence until scanning the Psycho Legacy website) but television wasn’t done with Norman entirely yet. Anthony Perkins’ swan song to horror’s most famous contemporary character would follow.

Death Ship (1980, Alvin Rakoff)

Part of the 1980's Project

A cruise liner mysteriously collides in the Atlantic ocean (all scenes of the crash are comprised of stock footage) leaving only a handful of survivors including a crew member (Richard Crenna), his wife and two young children, the ship’s lounge singer (Saul Rubinek) and the cranky captain (George Kennedy—because by law he had to be in every film involving some sort of accident or disaster that was made between the years 1970 and 1983). Luckily for the survivors, they find an abandoned ship in the middle of the ocean. Unluckily, it’s an old Nazi naval vessel that was used for torturing purposes that is haunted and begins possessing the soul of the captain. One by one the survivors start being picked off by strange circumstances, beginning with the lounge singer who is plunged into the ocean and drowned by various ropes and pulleys immediately. A death that is pretty much greeted by a collective shrug by the others; that’s what you get for not playing “Love Will Keep us Together”, buddy!

Death Ship is a film with large ambition, but limited resources. It appears as if the producers were able to procure the locations (meaning the ships) and some names for the cast, but their reach more often than not far exceeds their grasp. As I mentioned, the crucial collision scene is confusing and relies solely on previously existing footage from other films, giving us no real sense of what the survivors experienced, a real detriment considering the compounding horror that will follow. Director Rakoff relies way too heavily on shots of the mechanisms of the ship scored to creepy music for suspense, but the film does actually pick up a bit and become a lot more effective when the impact of the haunted ship begin occurring. A creepy atmosphere is finally attained and the film makes good use of the dark hallways of the haunted ship and there’s a few really disturbing effects including a film projector showing Nazi propaganda footage that won’t cease even after the project is destroyed, some good make-up work that shows the dangers of eating thirty-five plus year old mints (thirty-five year old Nazi mints, mind you) will have on your face, a bloody shower, and the most shocking scene, a room full of hung corpses. Kennedy nicely hams it up as the captain who becomes obsessed with and possessed by the spirit of a Nazi commander.

The concept of a haunted ship is a powerful one. Not only do you have the aspect of the spirit infestation but you have the isolation of no escape except the uncertain watery depths of the ocean. While never directly named a remake, the 2002 film Ghost Ship seems to work with the same general idea (I’ve never seen it, if you have, I’d be interested in your opinion) and even stole (or homaged) the poster art. Death Ship is hampered too much by its limitations, but only because it tries to be something grander than it is. If it had just opened with the survivors on the lifeboat, the film would not be bogged down by a dull first act.

Death Ship, a UK production shot in Canada, was released on VHS via Embassy in the 1980’s, but has been out of print in America ever since. It does have a Spanish DVD release and I found a copy via Cinema de Bizarre, which seem to be a transfer from a Japanese source. The print is a bit faded, but is oddly enough, presented in anamorphic widescreen.

New Year's Evil (1980, Emmett Alston)

Part of the 1980's Project

Ever the industrious duo, producers Yoram Globus and Menaham Golan and their company The Cannon Group was not content to just cash in on the holiday slasher movie genre, so they placed it within the confines of a punk rock setting (referred to as “New Wave” in the film, but actually more punk-mental in sound) for their 1980 release New Year’s Evil. The resulting film is a bit of an oddity, not really scary, but I had a lot of fun with it and found it quite funny, and intentionally so (I think).

It’s New Year’s Eve and Blaze, the emcee of Los Angeles’ premiere punk rock music show (the American Bandstand for the CBGB’s set) is hosting an all-night extravaganza that will feature live countdowns in every time zone. Early into the show, a caller threatens her using a voice distorter which makes him sound like a castrated Muppet (loved his pronunciation of the word killer which he draws out to “kiiiiiiiiiillllllllllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrr”), with the promise that at the stroke of midnight in each time zone he will kill someone close to her crescendoing in her death at midnight Pacific standard time. A killer who respects time zones, I can appreciate that, even if when he says people “close to you” he actually means in a geographical sense, not like relatives. Man, homonyms can be a bitch!

New Year’s Evil then intercuts between the Punk Rock show and the killer as he performs his hourly murders. In a shocking development, the killer doesn’t wear a mask of any sort, he’s just some dude. Sure, occasionally he puts on an orderly outfit to get into a sanitarium or a moustache at a singles’ bar, but I saw that as a necessity of his goal, and besides, it’s handled in a more inventive Jim Rockford manner than anything of the likes of Michael Meyers.

The scenes following the killer are actually presented as black comedy. When her picks up an airhead blonde at a singles’ bar, he gets stuck with her roommate and has to listen to them babble on about EST and Zen practices. All the while trying he’s trying to figure out how to murder them by 12:00AM Central Standard Time. Imagine if Psycho and Quick Change had a baby, and you get the vibe of the film as our killer repeatedly struggles to fulfill his one kill per hour by such obstacles as being chased by bikers and getting locked out of a hotel. Looking at director Emmett Alston’s filmography, it becomes apparent that he viewed this as an opportunity to provide a comical slant to the proceedings; his prior work includes many independent comedies with genre roots. The punk group performing at the television show, Shadow, perform songs that comment on the plot, including the titular theme song and a ditty called “Dumb Blonde” which scores the scenes in the singles’ bar. Alston may lack visual panache or effective suspense filmmaking skills, but at least he has a calling card shot: dead eyed slow swaying dancers. They are at the show, the sanitarium and the singles’ bar. It’s his Leone eye close-up or Kubrickian tracking shot!

Okay, it’s SPOILER TIME, skip to the last paragraph if you don’t want the obvious identity of the killer revealed. So, yeah, it turns out its Blaze’s husband who was allegedly “resting in Palm Springs” (a euphemism I am going to use if I ever become a serial killer) that is committing the crime. And his motive: Blaze is becoming so successful; she’s ignoring him and her son, a wannabe actor. Pretty much every slasher film concerns men subjugating woman for eighty-five minutes with phallic instruments of destruction, until the woman strikes back in the final five minutes, but New Year’s Evil makes it the whole thematic point of the film. While I am all for powerful working women (and am married to one), she is kind of a jerk to her son for whom she’s basically so obsessed with her hosting duties she doesn’t have two minutes to listen to the news that he got an acting gig. Not saying she deserves to be killed, but a little more motherly instinct might result in your son not wearing your panty hose on his face or the twist where it's revealed he is probably going to finish his dad’s work. END SPOILER.

I read somewhere how the bigger the horror film fan you are, the less scared you actually are watching them. I guess that’s true to some extent. However, recently I’ve noticed myself being affected a lot more by them now that I am older and have a wife, generally though the more horror you see, the less impact they have. So the result is you end up becoming something akin to a jazz aficionado, where you know the tropes and the beats, and learn to appreciate the minor touches. Here it would be the comedic and thematic flourishes. No, New Year’s Evil will not have you hovering in fright in the corner of your house, but that doesn’t make it without worth. For one reason or another, New Year’s Evil has never been released on DVD, but it’s currently available for streaming on Netflix.