This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead Teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they’re all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn’t matter.
Sinking into my seat in this movie theater from my childhood, I remembered the movie fantasies when I was a kid. They involved teenagers who fell in love, made out with each other, customized their cars, listened to rock and roll, and were rebels without causes. Neither the kids in those movies nor the kids watching them would have understood a worldview in which the primary function of teenagers is to be hacked to death.
Friends & Lovers
(Directed by George Haas; starring Stephen Baldwin, Claudia Schiffer, Robert Downey, Jr.; 1999)
I don’t want to review Friends & Lovers, I want to flunk it. This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from tenth graders that are better made than this.
Last week I hosted the first Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, for films that have been unfairly overlooked. If I ever do a festival of films that deserve to be overlooked, here is my opening-night selection. The only possible explanation for the film being released is that there are stars in the cast (Stephen Baldwin, Claudia Schiffer, Alison Eastwood, Robert Downey, Jr.). They should speak sternly with their agents.
The story involves a group of friends spending the holidays in a Park City ski chalet. They’re involved in what an adolescent might think were adult relationships. Much time is spent in meaningless small talk. We also get the ultimate sign of writer desperation: characters introducing themselves to each other.
If I were marking this as a paper, I would note:
Director George Haas often lines up actors so they awkwardly face the camera, and have to talk sideways to one another.
Much of the dialogue is handled by cutting to each character as he speaks. This is jarring because it reveals that the movie knows when each character will speak. Professional movies overlap sound and image, so that dialogue begins offscreen, before a cut to the speaker.
The characters frequently propose toasts, as if the movie is a social occasion.
Pregnant girl looks like she has a pillow stuffed down her dress. Self-consciously holds her belly with both hands in many scenes.
Dad puts tin can in microwave. Can explodes, and whole chalet is plunged into darkness. I am not surprised that a character in this movie would be stupid enough to microwave an unopened can, but why would the explosion blow every fuse?
Characters gossip that one character has a big penis. Everyone strips for the Jacuzzi. Movie supplies close-up of penis. Since this is the first nudity of any kind in the movie, audience is jolted. In a light comedy, a close-up of a penis strikes a jarring note. An amazed reaction shot might help, but represents a level of sophistication beyond the reach of this film.
The general preoccupation with sex and size reminds me of conversations I had when I was eleven. One guy says a female character has two-inch nipples. No one questions this theory. I say two-inch nipples are extremely rare among bipeds.
Dad says, “My generation thought that working was the best way to support a family.” Dad doesn’t even know what generation he belongs to. Dad is in his fifties, so is a member of the sixties generation. He is thinking of his parents’ generation.
All dialogue on ski slopes involves ludicrous echoing effects. Yes, a yodel will echo in the Alps. No, conversational levels will not echo in Utah.
David seems to be a virgin. Friend asks: “You have never done the dirty deed?” David asks, “How exactly would you define that?” Friend makes circle with thumb and finger, sticks another finger through it. Most twenty-something movie characters have advanced beyond this stage.
Automobile scenes are inept. One “crash” is obviously faked to avoid damaging either vehicle. In a scene that cuts between girl walking by road while a guy drives beside her and talks through open window, the girl is walking at a slower rate of speed than car.
I have often asked myself, “What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?” Now I know.
Frogs for Snakes
(Directed by Amos Poe; starring Barbara Hershey, Harry Hamlin; 1999)
Amos Poe’s Frogs for Snakes is not a film so much as a filmed idea. That could be interesting, but alas, it is a very bad idea. The film is about a group of Manhattan actors who support themselves between roles by working as gangsters and hit men, and as the film opens they turn their guns on one another. This is a movie that gives new meaning to the notion of being willing to kill for a role.
Barbara Hershey stars, as a waitress and debt collector who used to be married to crime kingpin Al (Robbie Coltrane), who doubles as a theater producer and is preparing a production of Mamet’s American Buffalo. She and several other characters spend much of their time hanging out in a diner and talking about absent friends. So much time is spent in the diner, indeed, that Frogs for Snakes begins to resemble a one-set play, until there are excursions to pool halls, apartments and even a theater.
Sample dialogue, from a pool halclass="underline"
“What are you doing here?”
“We heard you were doing True West.”
“Well, you heard wrong. We’re doing American Buffalo.”
[Shoots him]
Not a single one of the characters is even slightly convincing as anything other than an artificial theatrical construction. Is that the point? I haven’t a clue. Much of their dialogue is lifted intact from other movies, sometimes inappropriately Lisa Marie plays a buxom sex bomb who recites Harry Lime’s speech about cuckoo clocks from The Third Man. Other speeches come from Night and the City, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, The Hustler, The Apartment, Repo Man, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and several more. (The film ends by crediting the screenplays, just as most films end with a scroll of the songs on the sound track.)
“Today they write dialogue about cheeseburgers and big special effects,” one of the characters says, contrasting the quoted classics with Pulp Fiction. Yes, but Tarantino’s cheeseburger dialogue is wonderful comic writing, with an evil undercurrent as the hit men talk while approaching a dangerous meeting; no dialogue in this movie tries anything a fraction as ambitious, or risks anything.
Seeing the cast of familiar actors (not only Hershey and Robertson but Harry Hamlin, Ian Hart, Debi Mazar, John Leguizamo, and Ron Perlman), I was reminded of Mad Dog Time (1996), another movie in which well known actors engaged in laughable dialogue while shooting one another. Of that one, I wrote: “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.” Now comes Frogs for Snakes, the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of Mad Dog Time.
Frozen Assets
(Directed by George Miller; starring Shelley Long, Corbin Bernsen, Dody Goodman; 1992)
I didn’t feel like a viewer during Frozen Assets. I felt like an eyewitness at a disaster. If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety. And if I’d been an actor in the film, I would wonder why all of the characters in Frozen Assets seem dumber than the average roadkill.