The Kurt Thomas character meets the beautiful princess, who is to be his guide to Parmistan, and falls in love with her. Back in her native land, alas, she is engaged to marry the evil Zamir (Richard Norton), who is the Khan’s chief henchman. Thomas is chased by various bands of thugs, and saves himself by using his gymnastic ability. For example, running down a narrow street, he spies a parallel bar between two buildings, starts swinging from it, and smashes the thugs with his deadly feet. Good thing that bar was there.
Halloween: H20
(Directed by Steve Miner; starring Jamie Lee Curtis; 1998)
Notes jotted down while watching Halloween H20:
• Medical science should study Michael Myers, the monster who has made the last two decades a living hell for Laurie Strode. Here is a man who feels no pain. He can take a licking and keep on slicing. In the latest Halloween movie he absorbs a blow from an ax, several knife slashes, a rock pounded on the skull, a fall down a steep hillside, and being crushed against a tree by a truck. Whatever he’s got, mankind needs it.
• How does Michael Myers support himself in the long years between his slashing outbreaks? I picture him working in a fast-food joint. “He never had much to say, but boy, could he dice those onions!”
• I have often wondered why we hate mimes so much. Many people have such an irrational dislike for them that they will cross the street rather than watch some guy in whiteface pretending to sew his hands together. Examining Michael Myers’s makeup in Halloween H20, I realized he looks so much like Marcel Marceau as to make no difference. Maybe he is a mime when he’s not slashing. Maybe what drove him mad was years and years of trying to make a living in malls while little kids kicked him to see if he was real. This would also explain his ability to seem to walk while somehow staying in the same place.
• I happen to know Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the smartest people in Hollywood. I cannot wait for the chapter on horror movies in her autobiography.
• There is a scene in the movie where a kid drops a corkscrew down a garbage disposal. Then the camera goes inside the garbage disposal to watch while he fishes around for it. Then the camera cuts to the electric switch on the wall, which would turn the disposal on. I am thinking, if this kid doesn’t lose his hand, I want my money back.
• Michael Myers may also have skills as an electrician. All of the lights and appliances in every structure in this movie go on or off whenever the plot requires him to. I can imagine Myers down in the basement by the fuse box, thinking, “Gotta slash somebody. But first . . . geez, whoever filled in the chart on the inside of this fuse box had lousy handwriting! I can’t tell the garage door from the garbage disposal!”
• I think Jamie Lee Curtis shouts “Do as I say!” twice in the movie. I could be low by one.
• Yes, the movie contains the line “They never found a body.”
• Michael Myers, described in the credits as “The Shape,” is played by Chris Durand. There is hope. Steve McQueen started his career in (but not as) “The Blob.”
• Half of the movie takes place in an exclusive private school, yet there is not a single shower scene.
• Speaking of shower scenes: Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee’s mother, turns up in a cameo role here, and she started me thinking about what a rotten crock it is that they’re remaking Psycho. I imagined Miss Leigh telling her friends, “They wanted me to do a cameo in the remake of Psycho, but I said, hell, I’d do Halloween H20 before I’d lower myself to that.”
Happy Gilmore
(Directed by Dennis Dugan; starring Adam Sandler, Carl Weathers; 1996)
Happy Gilmore tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it’s about golf, that makes it a comedy. The movie, the latest in the dumber and dumbest sweepstakes, stars Adam Sandler as a kid who only wants to play hockey. He hits the puck so hard he kills his father, who is in the act of filming a home movie. Actually, he kills his father’s camera, but it’s a small point.
Happy can’t skate very well, and when he’s not chosen for the hockey team, he beats up the coach. Life seems to hold no future for him. After his father’s death he is taken in by his beloved grandmother (Francis Bay), and then a crisis strikes: The IRS seizes Grandma’s house and possessions. How can Happy possibly earn $275,000 to pay all of the back taxes?
During a visit to a golf-driving range, he discovers a hidden talent. He can hit the ball hundreds of yards, straight as an arrow. He’s taken under the arm of a veteran golf pro named Chubbs (Carl Weathers), who tries to teach him the game, but it’s Happy’s tendency to explode and pound his clubs into the ground when he misses a shot. (Chubbs retired from the Tour when a one-eyed alligator bit off his hand in a water trap; he is now forced to use a flimsy wooden hand, which he grasps with his real hand, which is clearly outlined beneath his shirt sleeve. No prizes for guessing that the alligator will turn up again.)
Happy’s long game is great but his short game stinks. He goes on the Tour, where the defending champion, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), becomes his archenemy. They go mano á mano for weeks, in a series of golf scenes that are too heavy on golf for nongolfers, and too irrelevant to the ancient and honorable game for those who follow it. At a Pro-Am tourney, Happy teams up with Bob Barker, whose fight scene seems longer in the preview trailer than in the movie.
The Happy Gilmore character is very strange. I guess we are supposed to like him. He loves his old grandma, and wins the heart of a pretty P.R. lady (Julie Bowen), who tries to teach him to control his temper. Yet, as played by Sandler, he doesn’t have a pleasing personality: He seems angry even when he’s not supposed to be angry, and his habit of pounding everyone he dislikes is tiresome in a PG-13 movie. At one point, he even knocks the bottom off a beer bottle and goes for Shooter.
It was a Heineken’s beer, I think. The label was a little torn. Maybe nobody paid for product placement. Happy Gilmore is filled with so many plugs it looks like a product placement sampler in search of a movie. I probably missed a few, but I counted Diet Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi Max, Subway sandwich shops, Budweiser (in bottles, cans, and Bud-dispensing helmets), Michelob, Visa cards, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Sizzler, Wilson, Golf Digest, the ESPN sports network, and Top-Flite golf balls.
I’m sure some of those got in by accident (the modern golf tour has ads plastered on everything but the grass), but I’m fairly sure Subway paid for placement, since they scored one Subway sandwich eaten outside a store, one date in a Subway store, one Subway soft-drink container, two verbal mentions of Subway, one Subway commercial starring Happy, a Subway T-shirt, and a Subway golf bag. Halfway through the movie, I didn’t know which I wanted more: laughs, or mustard.
The Happy Hooker
(Directed by Nicholas Sgarro; starring Lynn Redgrave, Jean-Pierre Aumont; 1975)
If Horatio Alger were alive today, he would no doubt be appalled by The Happy Hooker, the story of a girl who gets started off on the right foot in life but, through pluck and endurance, makes bad. The movie’s a success story in reverse, starting with its heroine being named Secretary of the Year in her native Holland and ending with her imprisonment in New York on charges of operating a disorderly house.
What all of this is supposed to prove is beyond me, unless it’s that America is still the land of opportunity, until you get caught. The film’s based on the autobiography of Xaviera Hollander, the former hooker who now writes a column for Penthouse in which readers can obtain the most astonishing advice about vacuum cleaners, household pets, and cold baths. I have no way of knowing if the book was based on fact—nor can the movie, being R-rated, give me many clues.