This is a comedy (not the right word) about a business executive (Corbin Bernsen) whose corporation sends him to a small town to run the bank. Only when he gets there does he discover it’s a sperm bank. Ho, ho. In the lobby, he meets a customer (Paul Sand) and their conversation goes like this:
Sand: “I’ve been making two deposits a week for the last seven years. I keep a lot on hand in case of an emergency.”
Bernsen: “That’s a smart move for the small depositor.”
“Well, it’s not that small.”
“A jumbo, huh? My door is open if you need a hand.”
Ho, ho, ho. Bernsen quickly (well, not that quickly) discovers his error, after meeting Shelley Long, who plays the nurse at the sperm bank. Among other local denizens is a strange young man named Newton (Larry Miller), who seems seriously troubled, and lives at home (in the local castle) with his mother (Dody Goodman). He invites Bernsen over to dinner and Bernsen ends up bunking with him, in the twin bed in Newton’s bedroom.
Meanwhile, the sperm count rises. The town’s population includes a large number of hookers and the usual assortment of salt-of-the-earth types, who rise, in various ways, to the challenge when the sperm bank gets an emergency order for 10,000 donations. How to inspire the laggard population to such an effort? Bernsen dreams up a big lottery with a $100,000 prize, and the local males line up to take their chances, while we get lots of condom jokes.
And so on. This movie is seriously bad, but what puzzles me is its tone. This is essentially a children’s movie with a dirty mind. No adult could possibly enjoy a single frame of the film—it’s pitched at the level of a knock-knock joke—and yet what child could enjoy, or understand, all the double entendres about sperm, and what goes into its production? This movie, as nearly as I can tell, was not made with any possible audience in mind.
Movies like Frozen Assets are small miracles. You look at them and wonder how, at any stage of the production, anyone could have thought there was a watchable movie here. Did the director find it funny? Did the actors know they were doomed? Here is a movie to watch in appalled silence.
Gator
Directed by Burt Reynolds; starring Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston, Lauren Hutton; 1976)
Gator is yet another Good Ol’ Movie, and not, I fear, the summer’s last. It stars that archetypal Good Ol’ Boy himself, Burt Reynolds, along with Lauren Hutton, who is a plenty good enough Good Ol’ Girl for me, and Jack Weston, who plays a Good Ol’ New York cop. If only it had a Good Ol’ Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol’ movie.
But it never quite connects, even though a summary of its key scenes is like a laundry list of action-’n’-romance clichés. It contains (a) a chase through the mango swamps featuring boats and a helicopter; (b) several chases through town in which the hapless cops once again get their own squad car stolen from them; (c) our ol’ friend the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude, in which Lauren Hutton and Burt Reynolds snuggle up real close and then run on the beach; (d) one tearful parting and one tearful reunion, and (e) a colorful villain with a weirdo sidekick.
The villain is Jerry Reed, the country-and-western singer, who runs a protection racket and has the whole county in his back pocket. He looks mean enough to chew up Waylon Jennings and spit him out, and that ain’t nothing compared to his sidekick.
The sidekick is named Bones and is played by a man named William Engesser, who looks as if all his width went into height. He’s so tall that he has to drive a car with a sunroof, so he can roll back the sunroof and sit with his head sticking through the top of the car. At chase speeds, he no doubt gets a lot of bugs in his teeth, and he has to watch the clearance in parking garages. “Tell ’em why they call you Bones, Bones,” says Jerry Reed. “Cause I tell ’em to,” Bones explains.
Reynolds plays a two-time loser who joins forces with the law so that his Pappy won’t have to go on welfare and his darlin’ little nine-year-old daughter won’t be shipped to a foster home. He’s teamed up with Weston, the New York cop, who is supposed to be undercover but sticks out, as Reynolds observes, like a bagel in a bowl of grits. Not too many Good Ol’ Boys have ever heard of bagels, but Reynolds has spent a lot of time on talk shows and has picked up cross-cultural references.
Anyway, Reynolds and Weston go after Jerry Reed and Bones, and there is a lot of scheming, especially after Reed signs up Reynolds as his bagman. Along the way, Reynolds falls for Lauren Hutton, a local TV reporter. (They fall in love in a cinematic tribute to the biggest 1940s romantic cliché: Their eyes meet and lock, they exchange tremulous close-ups, the background dialogue fades away, music plays.)
After a number of scenes in which violence is alternated in baffling fashion with in-jokes, love, down-home wit, pathos, slapstick, chases, desperation, arson, relief, murder, intrigue, and tears, retribution is achieved and the remaining relationships brought to bittersweet conclusions while Bobby Goldsboro sings “For a Little While.” This is a movie, you might say, that was intended to have something for everyone. I’m sometimes accused of giving away the endings; I’m afraid that’s the only way they’ll get rid of the one in Gator.
The Ghost and the Darkness
(Directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas; 1996)
The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it’s funny. It’s just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment. A bridge builder takes leave of his pregnant wife to go to Africa to build a bridge, and she solemnly observes, “You must go where the rivers are.”
The bridge man, named Patterson, is played by Val Kilmer in a trim modern haircut that never grows an inch during his weeks in the bush. He is soon joined by a great white hunter named Remington (Michael Douglas), whose appearance is that of a homeless man who has somehow got his hands on a rifle. If this were a comic strip, there would be flies buzzing around his head.
The men meet up in Uganda, where a big push is on to complete a railroad faster than the Germans or the French. The owner of the rail company is a gruff tycoon who boasts, “I’m a monster. My only pleasure is tormenting those people who work for me.” He is too modest. He also torments those who watch this movie.
Work on the railroad bridge is interrupted by a lion attack. Patterson spends the night in a tree and kills the lion. There is much rejoicing. Then another lion attacks. Eventually it becomes clear that two lions are on the prowl. They are devilishly clever, dragging men from their cots and even invading a hospital to chew on malaria patients. “Maneaters are always old, and alone, but not these two,” Remington intones solemnly.
The rest of the movie consists of Patterson and Remington sitting up all night trying to shoot the lions, while the lions continue their attacks. At the end we learn that these two lions killed 135 victims in nine months. The movie only makes it seem like there were more, over a longer period.
Many scenes are so inept as to beggar description. Some of the lion attacks seem to have been staged by telling the actors to scream while a lion rug was waved in front of the camera. Patterson eventually builds a flimsy platform in a clearing, tethers a babboon at its base, and waits for the lions. Balanced on a wooden beam, he looks this way. Then that. Then this. Then that. A competent editor would have known that all this shifting back and forth was becoming distracting. Then a big bird flies at him and knocks him off the beam, and right into a lion’s path. Lesson number one in lion hunting: Don’t let a big bird knock you into the path of a lion.