I'm the Honcho of the Hump! A Brit's Take on Hookers, Misfits and Other Fun Movie Stuff: Ice Dog Movie Guide, #6

By Dave Franklin

Kubrick's operatic exploration of the cosmos. Popeye Doyle in a commandeered car speeding after an elevated train. Jamie Lee Curtis' bare-breasted turn as a hooker. Alex DeLarge and his droogs on the rampage. The Man with No Name insisting a disbelieving gunslinger apologise to his mule. Sydney Pollack's glorious cross-dressing tale. And an upside-down Concorde outmanoeuvring the firepower of a military jet...

 

This is why I watch movies.

 

Or as Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar once mused: 'Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.'

 

Welcome to part six of Dave Franklin's Ice Dog Movie Guide, another scholarly analysis of cinematic history that somehow doesn't include one word about Adam Sandler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baby Ice Dog Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227468321

Dave Franklin

Dave Franklin is a Brit who lives Down Under. He has also written ten novels ranging from dark comedy and horror to crime and hardcore porn. His naughty work includes Looking for Sarah Jane Smith (2001), Begin the Madness: The Straitjacket Blues Trilogy (2014), The Muslim Zombies (2018) & Welcome to Wales, Girls: A Violent Odyssey of Pornographic Filth (2018).

Book preview

From Lightsabers to Sade

As a kid I craved a slingshot, especially after seeing pictures of the Black Widow model in a catalogue. With its moulded grip and foldaway wrist brace, I dreamed of wandering the neighbourhood fully armed. Tuck a steel ball bearing into its snug little pouch, draw the rubber tubing back with a trembling arm, take aim, let fly, and no doubt I’d be able to send my rightful vengeance through a goddamn brick wall.

Bloody ace or what?

However, mum and dad proved an obstacle, refusing point blank to even discuss buying one. I begged and pleaded but those spoilsports held firm and I never did get my mature, slightly anti-social hands on a Black Widow. Somehow, though, a bog standard, smaller slingshot ended up in my possession. And so I did the usual stuff like stacking empty Coke cans in a triangle on a backyard table while the oldsters were out. I might even have become quite good at sending those cans down to hell but, I dunno, the buzz slowly wore off. I guess the time comes in a young rascal’s life when the novelty of firing projectiles at stationary objects loses its lustre. Sooner or later you want to test your skill against something that moves.

Something alive.

And so one day I took off with a pocketful of pebbles and marbles on the lookout for suitable prey. I knew that firing at fellow children was likely to get me into trouble and might result in a copper dragging me home by the ear to face the wrath of mum and dad. Mind you, I was still tempted to pop over to Suzy Watkins’ house and maybe slam a marble or two into the back of her head following that game of kiss-chase two months earlier on the school field when I’d caught her fair and square and she wouldn’t allow a smacker.

Women. They’ve always done me wrong.

Anyhow, I couldn’t find Suzy Watkins. She was probably in town having a chastity belt fitted or something. Then as I trudged back from her house I spotted a sparrow perched in a roadside bush.

Perfect.

I was about to lock myself into a reverse David and Goliath battle, a duel to the death that I couldn’t possibly lose. Plus, no one would miss such a silly little birdie. Stopping short of a leopard crawl (mainly because the road was wet and I didn’t want to get my new Mr. Men T-shirt grubby), I instead crouched and awkwardly shuffled as close as possible.

Stopping twenty yards away, and already understanding what it was like to hunt VC in the jungles of Nam, I reached into a pocket and selected a smooth, round pebble. Maybe once the bird had been chastened by my lethal expertise, I’d strap it across my bike handles and triumphantly ride around in front of cheering mates. I took aim at the avian nonentity and fired.

Bingo! One moment my sworn enemy was obliviously twittering, the next it was rudely shoved backward into the bush. Whooping, I nipped across the road and parted the leaves to find the sparrow with a bright bead of blood on its chest.

My first kill! Buffalo next.

I went to grab the bird but, I dunno, it seemed to be looking at me. I returned the stare. Shut up, I said after a while. Shut up looking at me! I glanced around to see if anyone else was giving me the eyeball. I put the catapult away. Then I pulled off a few leaves to cover the tiny corpse. I backed off and walked home with my hands in my pockets. Maybe I wouldn’t tell my mates after all.

I don’t know what happened to that catapult. Perhaps I went back to shooting tin cans, maybe I chucked it in the bin. Whatever the case, I’m pretty sure the chaste, vaguely maddening Suzy Watkins never ended up in its line of fire. All I knew was that weapons weren’t for me, a feeling that intensified in my mid-twenties when I got to fire a .303 rifle and was intimidated by its recoil and awfully loud bang.

It’s a different story in the movies, though. I love the sick shit that people invent and use to obliterate whatever is close by. I’m talking the Night Slasher’s tremendously nasty knife in Cobra, those robot sentries in Aliens or Josey Wales jumping behind a Gatling gun to mow down a bunch of double-talking Redlegs. The Death Star, of course, is the ultimate weapon, a fun hi-tech toy that can annihilate a planet, but I also get a kick out of everyday objects being put to fiendish use, such as Jennifer Jason Leigh whacking a guy in the eye with a stiletto in Single White Female, a knitting needle implausibly shoved through a victim’s head in 1976’s Schizo, and the arm of a pair of glasses being driven even more implausibly into an unsuspecting throat during Godfather III.

Talking of the less sophisticated hardware, how about a pair of garden shears? For that’s what’s on offer in 1981’s The Burning, a graphic Friday the 13th clone with surprisingly decent direction, cinematography and synthesised score. Cooked up by the sick mind of Harvey Weinstein, it features a Jewish Peeping Tom and attractive young women being crudely pressurised by over-amorous men. Hmm, Harvey sweetie, are you showing us some sort of blueprint for your future adventures in Tinseltown? One female swimmer that rejects a dude’s advances has her riverside clothes stolen, forcing her to tramp naked and humiliated through the woods before her throat is slashed open.

And who is the killer? Well, his name is Cropsy. He’s the abusive, alcoholic caretaker of a New York summer camp who accidentally got set on fire years earlier when a prank went wrong. You’d think being hideously burned (or turned into a ‘fucking Big Mac overdone’ as a somewhat unsympathetic hospital orderly observes) would lessen his abilities to annoy others, but no, we’re in slasher territory so instead he becomes an expert wilderness tracker, a skilled ambusher, and even stronger than the middle-aged, sweater-clad Mrs. Voorhees.

His weapon of choice is the aforementioned shears, although apparently he trialled a trowel and a wheelbarrow before dismissing them as ineffective and impractical. Cropsy loves his well-oiled, oversized scissors and is often pictured in silhouette raising the clean, open blades above his crispy head. In the most memorable scene he lies in wait in a stolen canoe before rearing up and wreaking merry havoc on a raft-load of unsuspecting teens, puncturing jugulars and sending severed fingers flying all over the place.

The Burning has a cult following, as does the wonderful Enter the Dragon. It features the island-dwelling crime lord Han (Shih Kien), a middle-aged baddie who somewhat overcompensates for losing a mitt. And by that I mean he waves goodbye to those wimpy five fingers by replacing them with something hard and intimidating i.e. an iron left hand. Apart from that, it’s removable so when you’re about to take on someone out of the ordinary you can switch to a bear’s claws, the sort of weapon that leaves deep gouges across an opponent’s face. Of course, it’s a trifle inconvenient when you misjudge a blow and end up embedded in a table top, but handily(!) he’s also got a razor-sharp, four-bladed prosthetic. Cripes, this is a mean instrument of attack, and it plays an eye-catching, flesh-slicing role in his giddy final confrontation with Bruce Lee. Is this where Wes Craven got his idea for Freddy Krueger’s talons?

Dragon went onto be one of the most successful and influential films ever, but Schwarzenegger’s 1996 vehicle Eraser has never generated much enthusiasm. For a start it’s increasingly daft and way too long. This is a shame as the first forty-five minutes or so are fun. Arnie is a U.S. Marshall that works in Witness Protection, helping people fake their death (erasing them) before handing out a new identity. Meanwhile, a brave insider at a treasonous defence contractor has spilled her guts to the Feds about the company selling a top-secret electromagnetic rifle to the highest bidder. Even though this prototype doesn’t fire conventional bullets, it’s still ‘the most powerful assault rifle on Earth’ and able to fire rounds at almost the speed of light. If these things get offshore, there will be a whole new era of world terrorism, she tells Arnie.

We first get to see one of these beasts when the baddies turn up at her home to blow her away. It’s a chunky, black thing that needs charging up, but when it’s ready it hums with power. It also boasts some sort of x-ray night scope that can see through walls. Christ, this hi-tech darling can not only pick out the cutlery stacked inside your dishwasher, but the bones in your body. There’s no way you can miss, especially as it is able to lock onto a beating heart. When the trigger is pulled it makes a sound like a conventional rifle, but there’s no shoulder-bruising recoil like those brutish .303s. It shoots a rectangular beam of green light complete with wisps of smoke trapped in its wake, delivering a payload that sends you flying across the room and slamming into a wall so hard that the plaster cracks.

Of course, once Arnie foils this magnificent, state of the art killing tool by, er, hiding behind an overturned fridge, the baddies make the classic mistake of entering the house. Why would you do this when you’ve got a weapon that can see everything in its line of fire from a hundred yards away? No matter, because Eraser’s sophisticated special effects hold up well and the movie is dead cool whenever this ‘compact hyper-velocity pulse weapon’ is strutting its arse-kicking stuff.

Dolph Lundgren punched his way to cinematic prominence a few years after Arnie’s arrival, but despite that fantastic starring debut in Rocky IV he spent the rest of the twentieth century blundering around in his action rival’s substantial shadow. In fact, he never proved bankable, rolling in doo-doo with 1987’s Masters of the Universe and rounding off the decade by spewing crap like Red Scorpion and The Punisher. However, although 1990’s fast paced, tongue-in-cheek Dark Angel (aka I Come in Peace) also flopped, it’s worth a peek.

Lundgren plays a Houston cop whose partner is killed by a bunch of yuppie drug dealers, a situation quickly complicated by the arrival of an extraterrestrial drug dealer. This long-haired, white-eyed dude likes to inject his victims with heroin and extract the resulting endorphins (‘nature’s ecstasy’) from the brain so he can sell them to addicts back on his home planet. He’s armed with a ricocheting, razor-sharp flying CD. Let loose in a confined space it will bounce off walls, slash throats, and keep going until everyone’s brown bread.

Or red bread.

Its energy is limitless so even if it gets stuck in an object, it keeps vibrating and trying to wriggle free in its bid to reacquaint itself with flesh. "Now that’s a murder weapon, Dolph says. He takes it to a geek scientist who explains it’s essentially an incredibly powerful, self-contained electro-magnet attracted to a person. The human body carries a small electrical charge. You tune the disc to the charge and... it’s like tuning your radio dial to K-I-L-L."

Eventually an alien cop turns up on the trail of the alien drug dealer. He’s got a flame-throwing machine gun that causes everything to blow up. You’d think such a scorched-earth kind of weapon would be preferable to a little flying disc, but despite destroying half the neighbourhood the silly arse doesn’t get close to neutralising his quarry. Anyhow, Dark Angel might be a Hidden rip-off, but it’s still brutal fun, filled with pyrotechnics, good stunts and a healthy dose of comedy.

Perhaps the makers of the British horror hit Shaun of the Dead saw Dark Angel and amused themselves by imagining that flying CD imprinted with some ghastly music, a quirk that could conceivably add insult to fatal injury. The stylised, London-set Shaun has a promising opening forty minutes that suggests we’re already becoming zombies with our smartphone use, routine intoxication and mind-numbingly repetitive jobs. Hence, when actual zombies arrive they don’t particularly stand out.

Caught up in this apocalypse are loser salesman Simon Pegg and his obese best mate Nick Frost, a jobless layabout who specialises in playing computer games and farting. Two hungry zombies turn up in the garden, prompting them to hurl a toaster, mug, coffee jar and laundry basket their way. All prove useless until a hip hop compilation LP causes a bit of facial damage. Suitably inspired, the pair flees to the shed and drags out a caseload of albums. Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times and a couple of Stone Roses are deemed too valued to hurl at the lumbering invaders, but Dire Straits, Sade and Prince’s Batman soundtrack all take scything flight. Fair enough, although I would have preferred New Kids on the Block’s Greatest Hits to have been sent thudding into an undead face. Or, indeed, a living fan’s face. Eventually, however, Pegg and Frost get down to the requisite brain-destroying business with a far more effective shovel and cricket bat.

The 1979 low-budget big hit Phantasm also features the undead. Dwarf, black-cowled ones. Its intriguing first forty minutes (which feature capable direction, an atmospheric score and an off kilter vibe) give way to a less impressive second half, making Phantasm a good example of a Not Quite. Still, its surreal, semi-incoherent antics have attracted many a horror buff. The eerie action is set in a small Oregon town and you can tell it’s a fucked-up place because the place to go for sex is the graveyard. Its highpoint is undoubtedly the introduction of a flying silver ball that zooms around a beautiful, marbled mausoleum seeking victims. Once it locks onto a target, two wicked-looking blades pop out before it slams into a forehead. Then a power drill whirrs into life and begins boring through bone while powerful suction ejects a torrent of blood from the rear. It’s even cooler than a Black Widow slingshot, being the sort of toy every kid wants for Christmas.

Phantasm’s lethal silver ball is a blast just like Rambo’s explosive-tipped arrows and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, but in Cronenberg’s turgid Scanners no such hardware is needed. Instead the Canadian body horror specialist came up with the idea of psychics that possess incredibly strong telepathic and telekinetic powers, a somewhat easy to conceal weapon if you’re about to undergo one of those pat-down body searches or want to slip through customs.

We first see a scanner’s unusual talent in action when one gives an old woman (saying nasty things about him) a serious case of the shakes, causing her to fall off her restaurant chair. Good-oh, but that’s nothing to what the renegade Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) can do. Man, no amount of aspirin is gonna save you when this guy is in the mood because he’s capable of making your head explode, a brain-dispersing feat he manages after infiltrating a scanner-organised marketing event. Posing as an ordinary member of the public (and amusingly warned that he might end up with a nosebleed), he volunteers to be scanned. Suffice to say, he turns the tables, resulting in the best head-disintegrating scene since Joe Spinell jumped on a car bonnet with a double-barrelled shotgun in Maniac a year earlier.

Less cool is the weapon favoured by the unknowable killer in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. In fact, it’s hard to think of a more contrived and clunky killing tool, although Exterminator 2’s vigilante lumbering around New York’s crime-ridden streets in a welder’s face mask and full flame thrower kit does come close. 

Set in 1980 Texas, the masterfully directed No Country is a meditation on the unfathomable evils of modern-day America. The chief proponent of this sick shit is the coin-tossing hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a polite, Terminator-like monster with a hairdo that belongs on a Lego character. He wanders the countryside trying to retrieve an enormous sum of money for his gangster employers while amusing himself with an air-powered captive bolt pistol and existential asides.

Arrested early on, a junior cop is at a loss to explain this guy’s makeshift weapon. He had some sort of thing on him, he tells the sheriff over the phone, like an oxygen tank for emphysema or something and a hose that run down his sleeve. It’s a description that gives a fair idea of the device’s impractical nature, especially when we get to see it in action. After murdering the cop, Chigurh steals a patrol car, pulls over a lone highway driver, and lugs the tank of air to his imminent victim’s car. Luckily, this dumbo doesn’t have the nous to question why Chigurh isn’t in uniform so it’s no surprise that he then allows the weapon to be positioned in the centre of his forehead. Would you hold still please, sir? Chigurh asks before pulling the trigger and leaving a neat round hole. Christ, just use a handgun, you show-offy tit.

We’re supposed to take Chigurh’s bolt pistol seriously, but director Robert Rodriquez is clearly taking the piss with a dick-gun in the crass, relentlessly OTT From Dusk till Dawn. Aimed squarely at teenage boys, it’s a hybrid flick that combines crime and action before collapsing into rampant supernatural absurdity. The misplaced, drawn-out horror element falls flat, but queasily witnessing the ever-charmless Quentin Tarantino suck Salma Hayek’s tequila-drenched toes is already part of my sparrow-haunted nightmares.

Bank robbing brothers George Clooney and Tarantino leave a trail of dead across Texas, eventually making it over the border into a whacked out Mexican pub called the Titty Twister. Here we meet the goateed Tom Savini, a very talented F/X man but not exactly the world’s greatest actor. He plays a mean, leather-jacketed biker happy to steal a bottle of beer from a so-called mate. When challenged with a flick-knife, Savini glances at his own codpiece and with some sort of telekinetic command manages to unveil a pork sword. No, hang on, I mean a penis-shaped pistol that initially points at the ground before snapping to attention. The knifeman quickly realises he might cock-up if he takes on this aggressive groin so he leaves. A little anticlimactic, yes? Ten minutes later, though, we get the money shot when a burly vampire grabs Savini and is orgasmically blasted by a penile bullet.

Oh, the super-dooper world of movies!

Square Thesps in Round Roles

Gotta admit, I’ve seen some shit casting in my time. John Wayne takes the Mongolian biscuit as Genghis Khan, but 1956’s The Conqueror is otherwise too dull to bother writing about. Sean Connery fares almost as badly as an African Muslim in 1975’s more watchable The Wind and the Lion, a man incapable (even when winning his only Oscar) of disguising his Scottish brogue.

I have also seen Charlton Heston trying to pass himself off as a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Then there’s Rod Steiger as Napoleon so lacking in charisma and authority that I’m surprised his soldiers followed him across the street, let alone into a big, chilly place like Russia. Tubby little Bobby Hoskins was much more fun as a dustbin lid-wielding ex-SAS priest in A Prayer for the Dying, but I’ve already ragged on that piece of watchable rubbish just like I’ve dismissed Michael J. Fox as a soldier in Nam, Tom Cruise as a vampire, Diana Ross as The Wiz’s overage Dorothy, Mick Jagger as an Aussie outlaw, and Geena Davis as a goddamn pirate leader.

I was tempted by the laidback Roger Moore getting no handle whatsoever on a Nazi commandant in 1979’s crappy Escape to Athena, but instead plumped for Gregory Peck’s unwise stab at swastika worship a year earlier. Here are half a dozen or so other absurdly filled roles that somehow don’t include Mel Gibson as Hamlet.

Halle Berry as poor black trash in Monster’s Ball (2001)

Ball is not a good capital punishment flick, especially as it hangs on two characters (a prison guard and the wife of a condemned murderer) repeatedly wandering around the same place over a significant period of time never catching sight of one another. It depicts a world in which the blacks are polite and dignified (including the artistic killer) while the main white characters are screw-ups. Heath Ledger is the nicest, but he’s still a depressed, lonely, borderline alki who can’t make it past the twenty-second mark when banging a hooker.

As for Berry, her Oscar-winning turn sticks out like a sore thumb. She’s not believable for a second, which is a bit of a worry as this appears to be pretty much her best film. Her character Leticia drives to the penitentiary in a shitbox on wheels leaking radiator fluid. It doesn’t even have a foot-square patch of paint left, let alone a full set of number plates. She chain-smokes, occasionally steals, consumes crap TV and can no longer afford to make the house payments. It’s implied her absurdly polite and dignified hubby used to abuse her (Every time I hurt you, I’m sorry.) In turn, she physically abuses their ‘fat little piggy’ candy-scoffing blob of a son. Why is she not obese like her bovine, waddling son, given that parents and their children usually consume the same meals? It’s not like we see any shots of Leticia vigorously exercising (unless you count her sex scene). She then gets fired from a waitressing job for being continually late and eventually loses her home.

In short, she’s poor black trash.

And yet she’s gorgeous in every scene, no doubt the result of a very comfortable, middle class upbringing. Perfect hair, skin and teeth. Elegant, understated jewellery. A voluptuous figure without an ounce of fat. A dead cert to win any beauty pageant around. No wonder hubby tells her during their last meeting: Hey, baby. You look nice today.

Now Michelle Pfeiffer as an emotionally scarred, near-basket case waitress in Frankie and Johnny was pretty damn unpersuasive, but Berry’s turn as a similarly downtrodden table jockey is off the scale daft. Jesus Christ, save me from terrified 21st century white directors.

Matt Damon as a foulmouthed, brawling maths prodigy in Good Will Hunting (1997)

Damon is a lightweight so-called movie star not fit to polish the boots of the real deal like Marvin, Hackman and Eastwood. Seeing him do any tough guy stuff is always amusing and he was never funnier than in his cop-punching breakthrough. Here we’re supposed to believe he’s not only a surly ex-con, but an irresistible combo of brawn and brains. Not that this risible blend stops him slumming it as a janitor at a prestigious university, mopping the floors as the privileged kids traipse around him, somewhat startled by the enormity of the chip on his shoulder.

Damon, you see, is a soul in torment, a self-taught maths genius on parole who favours drinking with his sweary blue collar buddies and making things as difficult as possible rather than fulfilling his potential.

And, of course, he likes to fight.

First up is a guy that used to bully him in kindergarten. What? How does anyone remember that far back? Damon just steps out of his car and starts a rumble on the street in a terribly choreographed, slow-mo confrontation bizarrely scored to Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street.