JFL

After a series of ideologically tinged action B-movies for Cannon Films, which anointed Chuck Norris as the bearded battering ram of Reagan’s America, and the absurd animated television project Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, the star decided to use his exclusive contract with Cannon to try out a new type of role. The first project in this vein was Firewalker, which was intended to turn the martial-arts expert into an Indiana Jones-type adventurer. Though the screenplay attempts to pile up exaggerated adventure scenes and fill them with catchphrases, it all falls apart due to the fact that Norris is incapable of playing a protagonist who doesn’t take himself seriously because, after all, he takes himself deadly seriously. And that’s not even to mention the hopeless unlikable nature of the main duo and the complete lack of charm and levity, which are crucial for a film in this genre. Whereas Chuck’s previous movies are memorable for their bombast and lack of discernment, Firewalker is particularly bland and forgettable.

Like his preceding Lifeforce, Hooper’s second project under his three-picture deal with Cannon Films is a fanboy effort by which the director fulfilled his dream of shooting a remake of his favourite film from childhood with the use of modern effects. Except for the effects, however, his reworking of the 1950s sci-fi flick Invaders from Mars unfortunately brings nothing new to the table. In terms of narrative, this literal copy retains not only the paranoid premise, but also the naïveté and half-baked nature of the original. By imaginatively interpreting and reworking the original, Hooper could have made a great contribution to the then-current trend of children’s films based on horror and science fiction. However, Hooper’s ambitions did not extend in that direction, which is confirmed by the involvement of a completely uncharismatic and hopeless actor in the lead role (it is no surprise that his career came to a halt after this). Following the example of 1950s trash flicks, Hooper didn’t care who played the hero, because neither the protagonist nor any motifs relating to childhood are of any concern here. The protagonist is merely a puppet in the hands of an ideologically tinged screenplay that seems out of place in the context of the 1980s. Like his other projects for Cannon Films, Hooper’s Invaders from Mars is fascinating as a completely unprecedented and unrepeated phenomenon in Hollywood cinema, when a talented filmmaker gains access to a generous production environment in order to please himself by making projects that do not in any way take any trends or commercial calculations into consideration.

With Memories Within Miss Aggie, Gerard Damiano leaves the shadow of his ground-breaking but extremely sloppy Deep Throat far behind. After his brilliant theological treatise on pleasure, The Devil in Miss Jones, he joined forces with ambitious screenwriter Ron Wertheim, whose creative focus in the field of pornography is somewhat bizarrely split between cheerful espionage parodies and densely psychological art films with elements of horror. Alongside the masterpiece Through the Looking Glass, Memories Within Miss Aggie belongs to the latter category. From the opening credits, the film intoxicates viewers with its unsettling atmosphere of loneliness and devastation, enhanced by the setting of snow-covered rural solitude, which is unusual for a porn flick. The title character, the frail, middle-aged Aggie attempts – in front of the viewers, her husband and herself – to remember how she actually met her husband. -- SPOILER ALERT -- What at first appears to be a sweetly concealed romance turns out to be a fantasy in three very different versions, each of which delves more deeply into repressed sexuality and lust, always played out against the background of some classic cliché associated with sexual roles. Similarly as in The Devil in Miss Jones, Damiano shoots the sex sequences with absolute focus on the women and their pleasure, gradually pushing the men aside until the desired object becomes a mere screen on which lust is projected. However, each version of the protagonist’s memories thus loses intimacy and becomes more impersonal. In her anxious obsession with whether or not she was a decent girl, Miss Aggie, who is aptly portrayed by a different actress in each version, reveals not only her libido, but also the fear that comes with not knowing whether or not she will fulfil expectations, or if she will repel her partner with her hidden desires. The final denouement, though expected, then brings forth the inevitable confirmation of the pathology of repressed desires and, despite its horrific nature, shows Miss Aggie as a tragic figure tormented by conflicting forces. It is hard to say how the audience, attracted to porn cinemas by posters abounding with superlatives uttered by critics, reacted to Memories Within Miss Aggie at the time, when instead of the desired raunchy spectacle, they got a dense psychodrama. This porn film with an unreliable narrator remains a unique eccentricity within its genre to this day.

Together with Sweden, Denmark in the 1960s was already considered to be the most liberal country in terms of sexuality and its depiction in film. In 1969, Denmark was the first country to officially abolish all censorship, which brought about a boom in pornographic film production. However, it differed significantly from how porn subsequently looked in the US and France. At least the most popular titles, which include In the Sign of the Virgin, the first part of the six-film Tegn series, were aimed at a broad middle-class audience. Instead of long clinical shots and endless monotonous penetration sequences, the most popular Danish porn flicks of the 1970s are thus rather rollicking sex comedies or melodramas, where a fleeting shot occasionally confirms that the escapades here are not fake. In the Sign of the Virgin and the other films in the Tegn series were based on bright erotic comedies such as the still basically softcore Sengekanten series, and it is no coincidence that they exhibit a number of parallels with German erotic films. This was due in part to the fact that Danish porn was created in the context of co-productions and was intended for sale in other, mainly European countries that had not yet established their own porn industry (this also proved to be fateful for Danish films, when they were subsequently displaced by more explicit foreign films in Europe and in Denmark itself). In the Sign of the Virgin shares with German erotic films not only frivolity and playful licentiousness, but also a certain style of humour. With the exception of sportive young girls and the utilitarian nameless extras for the orgy scenes, all of the other characters are portrayed as caricatures and burlesque clowns, entailing a lot of overacting, mugging and superficial jokes. The film thus oscillates between brilliant gags, unexpected formalistic insertions (a symbolist dream sequence on the subject of erections) and drawn-out jokes, as well as incomprehensibly inappropriate passages (an intense bullying sequence). A separate chapter is the narrative itself, in which it is clear from the beginning how the situation around the girls’ boarding school in a remote hamlet will develop, when a commissioner with a libido-suppressing drug and a foolish scientist with a supply of a powerful aphrodisiac of his own making are heading there at the same time. In the end, however, it is possible to ignore the film’s inconsistencies and take it as a playful product of its time, where the overarching ideas that abstinence leads to aggression and lesbian play serves as a futile substitute for the thing women really desire peculiarly give rise to a hippie ode to free love, literally underscored by the contemporary hit What the World Needs Now Is Love.

After Shunji Ito’s multi-layered and formalistically avant-garde sequels, which took the potential of the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise to unprecedented levels, the fourth film brought not only an unfortunate change of director, but mainly also a completely moronic sequel that comes off as a vulgar disparagement of everything Itó and Kaji created together in the previous films. The first half of Grudge Song involves some motifs that, in the hands of a more ambitious director, could have been brought to fruition with respect to the theme of police brutality and revolutionary sentiments from recent demonstrations. But then the chaotic narrative brings us to the offensively straightforward and chauvinistically conceived second half set in a prison, where even logic and causality yield to brutishly superficial sequences. The gratuitous rape scene is so offensive in its unconcealed stupidity and victimisation that it can’t compare to the disgusting nature of Hasebe’s later rape scenes for the Nikkatsu studio during its decadent era of roman poruno production. The final nail in the coffin is the ridiculous and, in its anti-logic, borderline nonsensical climax, in which Hasebe remembered at the last moment that he could copy the theatrical formalistic elements of Itó’s works, but due to its shallowness, the result is merely an indictment of Hasebe’s lack of originality and conceptual thinking.

From the writers of the horror franchises Saw and Insidious and the television comedy hit Glee, Cooties is a horror comedy about an elementary school where children turn into bloodthirsty monsters and features a bunch of famous faces from popular films and TV series. Unfortunately, the result of this seemingly ideal recipe for a perfect movie is a mediocre and paradoxically unoriginal product. Every minute of the movie is marked by a conspicuous construct and an attempt at would-be non-conformity, as the teachers massacre the children, but everything is done at the level of maximum accessibility, predictability and tedium.

Cannon Films may have been celebrated as a factory churning out trashy dreams, but in its time, it heralded some of the trends that would turn up in Hollywood in the new millennium. We can describe one of its most critically successful titles as a forerunner of the trend involving the hiring of filmmakers with a distinctive creative signature and character actors for big-budget action projects. Soviet national artist and prominent filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky longed to work in Hollywood and his dream was fulfilled by the head of Cannon Films, Menahem Golan. In return for that, Konchalovsky was the only one of a number of filmmaking greats for whom Cannon financed original projects to work repeatedly for the company – in total, he made four movies for Cannon. Runaway Train adheres to the format of a standard blockbuster with the three-level “the book, the hook, the look” concept. For viewers, the hook was the involvement of a renowned director and a magnificent cast led by Jon Voight and the talented young actors Eric Roberts and Rebecca De Mornay. The film’s distinctive look was provided by the setting of the story in a frozen Alaskan wasteland and the tense reportage shooting style. The film’s source work was Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed screenplay based on an actual event that took place in 1962, when four coupled locomotives went out of control and dashed along the tracks of New York State. In collaboration with screenwriter Paul Zindel, Konchalovsky transformed Kurosawa’s script for a straightforward thriller into a thrilling parable about freedom, brutality and humanity. It was also Konchalovsky who decided to move the action to Alaska and to give priority to the characters of escaped criminals by adding prison scenes, which were polished for the screen by Edward Bunker, a writer with first-hand experience with maximum security prisons. To this day, Runaway Train has lost none of its impressiveness, breadth of meaning or its fierce pacing and suspense. Furthermore, it is fascinating as a rare ideal combination of absorbing spectacle with a superstructure comprising a creative approach that manages to distil its potential, which goes far beyond traditional genre categories.

As the defender of conservative American values on home soil, Charles Bronson returns to New York and this time, with the entirely open support of the police, launches a war against hooligans. The third escapade of Paul Kersey’s avenger offers up a casting concept, later adopted by Tomáš Magnusek, in which youths and non-actors in the roles of punks are pitted against award-winning veteran actors. Like Delta Force, another Cannon Films hit of the time, Death Wish 3 attracted attention due to the fact that it exploits actual events that stirred society, though it revised and exaggerated reality for ideological purposes. The unmentioned inspiration for the film was an incident that occurred on 22 December 1984, when Bernhard Goetz shot four young men who had tried to rob him in the New York subway. The incident became the embodiment of the mood among the residents of New York, which at the beginning of the 1980s was considered to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and sparked debates over the right to bear arms and self-defence. This trash fantasy with Bronson in the lead role is an entirely overt celebration of the right to bear arms and, in its individual scenes, directly highlights how beneficial it can be for urban communities when their members are armed. Bronson’s adoration for large-calibre weapons borders not only on blatant advertising, but also on perverse fetishism and clear Freudian compensation in other areas. Thanks to its exquisite lack of reason and its overt radicalism, as well as the bombastically heroic screenplay, Death Wish 3 is the most straightforward, entertaining and absurd instalment of the franchise.

Today, you just have to shake your head at the fact that this exercise in futility with horribly wretched action scenes could become a hit and a much-lauded classic of pirate video distribution in Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, the reasons for that are obvious. Though American Ninja comes across as serious and heroic, its style of action and concept of what it means to be a ninja is a comic-bookishly naïve fairy tale that mixes action, exoticism and pseudo-mysticism that will make even little boys roll their eyes. The popularity of the film and its sequels was significantly aided by the limited market at the time – Van Damme was still begging Cannon for his first film and Hong Kong movies were still a few years away from getting video distribution in Europe and elsewhere. And so Michael Dudikoff, a wooden actor with zero charisma, could become a star and a film with mediocre action sequences, where the editing and camerawork attempt to conceal the utter lack of choreography and the physical ineptitude of most of the cast, could become a hit. This sorry situation is thus even worse for the excellent Steve James, whose vitality, charisma, playful exaggeration and real martial-arts skills upstage Dudikoff in every scene. Only because he was black, however, he didn’t get much more than supporting roles in Hollywood in the 1980s.

While a series of raunchy teen comedies called Lemon Popsicle enjoyed popularity in Israel, in Hollywood its producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, tried in vain to bring its success and style to the American audience. After the meagre box-office earnings of the literal remake, The Last American Virgin, they tried their luck with lighter and shallower contributions to the genre, namely Hot Resort and Hot Chili. Both movies had the same premise about a group of youths who go through a series of racy situations during their summer jobs at a resort; only the locations differ and, furthermore, the films blatantly copy the most popular scenes from Lemon Popsicle, or rather The Last American Virgin. Hot Chili combines within itself the style of eighties teen comedies and raunchy German farces of the seventies, but instead of a boarding house in the Alps, here we have a luxury resort in Mexico. The narrative is thus composed of episodic scenes mixing superficial slapstick, spectacular nudity and raunchy jokes. Thanks to a well-cast ensemble of characters and the humorous situations in which they find themselves, the film works superbly as what it was intended to be – a shallow, raunchy comedy that revolves entirely around lascivious situations and the premise that everyone, regardless of the mask they where in public, has a sex life, or at least tries to have one. Incidentally, Hot Chili belongs to a strange subcategory of Cannon movies whose dubious narratives are rectified with a voiceover that was obviously added later (see America 3000, Sinbad of the Seven Seas and River of Death).