But for the most part, this is a depressing exercise, because Donner and his colleagues don’t seem to have caught on to two of the most obvious developments in recent British cinema: (1) British horror films have gotten to be pretty good recently, especially the horror films from Hammer Films and the Max Rosenberg-Milton Subotsky assembly lines, so you can’t get away with schlock, and (2) Swinging London is long since gone and done with and you can no longer entertain an audience by showing lots of what used to be called birds and dollies doing the frug beneath psychedelic lights.
Just at the point where the film’s suspense, if any, is going to have to come to its climax, Donner stops everything for a party scene that could have been ripped off from Blow-Up or all of those, uh, mod, with-it 1960s British films starring girls who didn’t know how to spell Susie. Some attempt has been made to make things contemporary by supplying Count Dracula with a black girlfriend, under the following circumstances. His female companion of the last several centuries, Countess Vampira, fell into a coma some fifty years ago and has been put into a deep-freeze while the Count seeks a cure. “But—aren’t vampires supposed to be immortal?” someone asks him. Yes, he explains, but the poor countess had a run of bad luck—ate some poisoned peasant. The count finds the rare triple-O blood group necessary to make a vaccine, injects it into his sleeping vampiress, and sees her turn black as she comes back to life. Something about mixing up the vials of blood. . . .
Well, black is beautiful, and the resurrected countess immediately hits the West End of London, digging the discos and going to black exploitation films and saying “right on” a lot, and the count turns into a bat and flies around looking for an antidote for the vaccine, and the ending is so obvious that I won’t tell you, you tell me. But when you think what a truly great bad movie David Niven might have made of all of this, it’s a shame he merely made a terrible bad movie. There’s a difference.
$1,000,000 Duck
(Directed by Vince McEveety; starring Dean Jones, Sandy Duncan; 1971)
Walt Disney’s $1,000,000 Duck is one of the most profoundly stupid movies I’ve ever seen. It is a movie about a duck that gets an overdose of radiation and starts laying golden eggs. It is also about the people who won the duck, and about how greed and avarice appear in their lives, and about the lesson in love and understanding that the father gets when his son runs away with the duck and becomes trapped on a ladder between the ledges of two tall buildings, and about how the father gets a fair trial from the American judiciary system.
The people in this movie inhabit a universe of clean little 1940s bungalows with rose trellises, and there’s a mean neighbor next door and some teenagers down the street who are always souping up their hot rod. This universe looks vaguely familiar, and you wonder where you’ve seen it before. It certainly doesn’t exist in the current American space-time continuum, but maybe . . .
And then you recognize the universe. The reason you had trouble before was that you’d never seen the whole universe before, but only its laundry room. This is the universe of those sweet, simple folks who live in TV soap ads. They mean well, poor souls, and they dress neatly and keep a cheery smile, but they must have been shortchanged in the smarts department because all they care about in this life is how white their whites get. At night they have surrealistic dreams in which their towels come out whiter and whiter and whiter until the whole laundry room is filled with dazzling metaphysical sunlight, and (at last!) their towels are clean and their sins forgiven.
The woman in the family in the movie has apparently survived nine years of marriage since she has an eight-year-old son, but her survival must have been a matter of blind luck. She makes applesauce with garlic in it because she doesn’t know any better, and she takes a golden egg down to the bank when her checking account gets overdrawn. Being married to such a woman would be wearying to her husband, you imagine; he is a young scientist engaged in teaching rabbits and ducks to walk down the ramp and through the maze and push the right button and be rewarded with rabbit food or duck food.
There was a Stan Freberg record once about a rat that was put through this ordeal. Over drawbridges. Up ramps. Through doors. Past dead ends. Across the moat. Up the ladder. And finally, finally . . . when the exhausted rodent reached his objective and punched the right button, do you know what came out of the little door for him to eat? A chlorophyll gumball.
One Woman or Two
(Directed by Daniel Vigne; starring Gérard Depardieu; 1987)
See if you agree with me on this. It is not funny when people in a movie walk around being dumb and making stupid mistakes, unless the people are named Curly, Moe, and Larry. If the characters are allegedly people of normal intelligence, their stupidity isn’t funny, it’s exhausting—and One Woman or Two is the most exhausting movie in many a moon.
The movie is about a French anthropologist who hopes to get a large research grant from a rich American woman. He does not know what she looks like. He goes to meet her plane, and through a comedy of errors he ends up connecting with Sigourney Weaver instead of Dr. Ruth Westheimer. That could happen to anybody. What is amazing is that he persists in his misunderstanding for half of the movie.
There is, of course, a lamebrained plot to explain why Weaver wants to be mistaken for somebody else. There is also a reason why “Dr. Wooth” missed her plane. And a subplot about the controversy over the scientist’s belief that the first Frenchman actually was a black woman. Add it all up, and what you’ve got here is a waste of good electricity. I’m not talking about the electricity between the actors. I’m talking about the current to the projector.
The scientist is played by Gérard Depardieu, everybody’s favorite French slob, who shuffles through the movie looking more sheepish than usual. He is provided with one of the most hapless characters of his career—a scientist so lacking in perception that he ignores literally dozens of opportunities to discover that the woman he is looking for is not an American amazon but a little German choo-choo. Once Dr. Ruth arrives, she is equally lax in determining that Weaver has been mistaken for her. The light dawns so slowly that this is one of those movies you wish were on video, so you could watch it at fast-forward.
Is there any redeeming facet to this movie? Anything at all that makes it worth seeing? Maybe some nice scenery, or a small, funny moment, or a flash of charm? Let me think. I’m sitting here. I’m thinking. I’m looking at the list of cast members, to see if anything jogs my memory. Nothing. Tell you what. I’m going to turn off my portable computer and close my eyes and meditate, and if anything at all occurs to me, then this will not be the last sentence of the review.
The Opposite Sex
(Directed by Matthew Meshekoff; starring Courteney Cox; 1993)
The people who made The Opposite Sex believe it’s about a love affair between a stockbroker and an aide to the mayor of Boston. I believe it’s about the fact that two of the most idiotic people in recent movie history were able to find employment.
This is the kind of movie where nothing that is done, said, thought, or performed bears any relationship to anyone you have ever met. No one, not even the people who made this movie, believes people can be this dumb and still tie their shoes. Making The Opposite Sex is what can happen to you if you grow up thinking sitcoms are funny.