Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex

United States – 1995

Director – Jonathan Betuel

New Line Home Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

Sometimes in the process of poisoning my mind with all these films I stumble across one that, despite its relative availability, just demands closer inspection. After watching Theodore Rex, there are a lot of things going through my mind. It’s a mess of confusion and wonderment up there, a jumble of emotion, fright, anger and even some sadness. I feel a little bit dirty. In case you are too young, have forgotten, or never had the pleasure of knowing at all, I’ll give you a quick refresher on the plot. In a nominally sci-fi future dystopia, detective Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg) partners with a bumbling, human-sized talking Tyrannosaurus Rex (“Teddy”) to solve the murders of several other dinosaurs. Much “hilarity” ensues. However, there is something much more problematic here than the fact that a talking dinosaur has just been given a job as a cop.

On the surface Teddy is an “adult” who drinks, chases women and has a job.  But because he talks, dresses and acts like a child, he is the film’s demographic selling point and titular hero.  Despite, or perhaps because of, his best efforts to channel Axel Foley, our “hero” is given all the attributes of the constantly frightened or mistake-prone sidekick. The subsequent hour and a half wallows in the resentment of his human counterparts. They make no secret of their contempt when such an obviously inferior creature is given a toy job on the police force in order to placate dino-rights activists, (I’m not making this shit up.) Even Whoopi uses the closet-bigot’s time honored phrase “you people,” (errr, dinosaurs.) In this light, we must recall that Theodore Rex is a product of the decade that gave us such PC Tokenism as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the backlash against Affirmative Action. As such, its bitterness towards childlike-adults (read: the mentally handicapped) reeks of the sort of recrimination familiar to an artist forced to sacrifice his aesthetic vision on the altar of commercial viability. Beneath its kiddie, buddy-cop exterior, Theodore Rex is an agonized cry of outrage at the decline of that great imperialist institution, “meritocracy”.

When confronted with movies of highly subjective quality, one often hears the question “why did this seem like a good idea?” This is an understandable response, a reflexive reaction to offended sensibilities, but it’s too loosely used against movies that venture into uncharted territory. Specifically the question lacks definition, being too subjective to serve as any real criterion. Humans are after all gifted with creative, imaginative minds which should be used and enjoyed even if their vision is sometimes more than a little out of their grasp. This film however is one movie for which this overused question is entirely appropriate. The anti-hero has a long tradition in narrative storytelling. Theodore Rex however, takes the unprecedented step of removing the hyphen from the trope and being literally against its hero. This sort of meta-ethical flip-flopping is dangerous, because it dissolves the existential barriers between film, audience and film-maker. It is a mind-warping paradox that can lead to feelings of betrayal and revulsion for all three parties, and ultimately to the sort of resentment that causes a writer/director to quit making films altogether.

Night Visitor

Night Visitor

United States - 1989

Director - Rupert Hitzig

MGM/UA Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

This awkward combination of high school sex comedy and occult horror has possibly the worst theme song in recent memory. I’m sure it would be in close competition with any number of other themes if I actually did a masochistic side-by-side comparison, but right now it is sufficiently grating enough to warrant the two opening sentences of this review.

The plot itself concerns dweeby high-school senior Billy Colton, a kid with a well known tendency to fabricate stories. So well known that when his new neighbor Lisa (Shannon Tweed in her first entirely clothed role to my memory) turns out to be a hooker, his friends don’t believe him. Nor do the cops believe Billy when the following night he witnesses his history teacher Mr. Willard sacrificing her while dressed in Satanic vestments. But the story is not really about murder or Satanism, as the paucity and silliness of both elements illustrates. There is something beyond simple age which makes us adults, a social threshold we must cross before being accepted into the adult world, and the sinister and mysterious ritual central to this and other similar films, represents the final hurdle of childhood, the secret taboo of mature sexuality.

Stop, you're busted!

Billy is just on the cusp of becoming a man, and with his graduation imminent adulthood is staring him tantalizingly in the face. But something is missing. He watches through a telescope as Lisa entertains another client, looks up to where she seems to know that he is observing, and winks knowingly, beckoning, challenging, offering that final hurdle. The next night he climbs onto Lisa’s roof to watch through a window as she entertains another client. It is at this point that before Billy sees anything, Mr. Willard catches him. Thus cut short of something he doesn't quite understand, Billy spends the remainder of the film running around trying to get the cops (Richard Roundtree) his friends, or anyone else to elucidate what he saw, but in the end of course, he has to discover it on his own.

Most importantly this involves Mr. Willard’s capture and pending sacrifice of Billy’s best friend Kelly (Theresa Van Der Woude) the prevention of which proves to be that final step propelling Billy into adulthood. Throughout the movie he has shown, though not confessed, a romantic interest in Kelly, and being of course the only “virgin” among Willard’s victims, she is the only woman who can really be “saved”. Having achieved this, Billy is now a man and the final few minutes of this awkwardly executed high-school-sex-“comedy”/horror flick can be padded with scenes of the freshly minted adult couple frolicking in public, no longer intimidated by that last taboo.

 Oh no, her shoes are off. Does that mean she's "done it"?

An Eye For An Eye

I know this is the DVD art, but it's the same as my VHS box.

An Eye for an Eye

United States – 1981

Director – Steve Carver

MGM Home Entertainment, 1998, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 46 minutes

In his second Steve Carver helmed movie (the other being Lone Wolf McQuade), The Norris plays another bull-headed, single-minded good-cop with little tolerance for any way but the "my-way". Everybody else gets round-housed down the "hi-way". All the better, supporting actors just drain attention away from The Norris. If you've ever wanted to see The Norris kick serious drug-peddler ass in a bright-red Members Only jacket or a puffy lumberjack-chic vest you get to see it here. Isn't that dandy. I also think this might be only the second movie in which I've seen The Norris crack a smile. It can be a little bit frightening, but don't let that deter you, it doesn't last for long. Even if it's completely formulaic, An Eye For An Eye doesn't pull any punches, just do not take it on an empty stomach.

On a big time undercover investigation, The Norris, here named Sean, and his over-the-hill partner, who's so unimportant I forgot his name, are set up, and partner is burned to death while pinned by a car. Sean resigns, throwing a hissy fit to Police Capitan Richard Roundtree. Partner's 26-year-old wife, Linda, a local news anchor, fake-cries on The Norris' shoulder and immediately does a long boring TV expose on the drug problem in San Francisco. As if this is something that is going to ruin their enterprise, "The Drug Business" sends some thugs after her. Just before they mercifully stifle her forced and wooden shrieking, she calls Sean, and tells him she found "something".

Later, Right before Roundtree kicks him out of Linda's apartment Sean encounters the deceased's neighbor/best-friend/coworker Heather. CAUTION: Weepy plain-looking ear and eye irritant. Sean goes to Linda's dad's house, a diminutive asian fellow (Mako) named…James. Duuuhhhhh. Okay then. Grrr, James want's revenge for his daughter's death so he ordered home delivery thugs, and he and Sean team up Double Dragon style.

Sean takes Heather to his wharf-side display home to add to his collection of emotionally dependent accumulate. There, she dramatically increases the stomach turning "Queasy Factor" of Sean's ratty dog as they frolic gaily about in his gilded cage. At his sizzling sweaty sexiest after waking up from a "flashback-to-the-first-scene" nightmare, Heather runs her fingers through Sean's dewy moist chest carpet and gradually sinks below the surface into Stockholm Syndrome. Retch.

The uncomfortableness of this quaint warm moment is quickly replaced by reaffirming masculine brutality when Sean and James team up again, first at the TV station where they discover the not very surprising heavy-handed truth about the powers behind the San Francisco drug trade. And finally with a tender moment on a grassy hillside outside the kingpin's decadent mansion. Disappointed with Sean's performance, sensei James quips, "I do not think this is going very well!" in his best wise Chinese guy sidekick voice.
The subsequent massacre of nearly every moving thing in the mansion has no effect on their chipper moods, Heather included, and they stroll gaily away from the bloodbath arm in arm, smiling and laughing in socially acceptable racist comic relief, apparently unconcerned that they just took something like 80 eyes for an eye.

Where's the dog? I need some playful yapping. Do not crush or chew, swallow whole. In case of ingestion, induce whiskey.

Some classic Embassy clamshell VHS box art.

Nice poster art I found at Atomic Pulp

Portrait of A Hitman

Portrait of a Hitman
United States - 1977
Director- Alan A. Buckhantz
Program Hunters Inc., 1983(?), VHS

Before the film there is a preview for a lousy looking film called Cat In A Cage, starring Sybil Danning.
Some guys in a helicopter chatter at each other as they track down a coyote or a wild dog, and take potshots at it. When they hit it, they land and one guy gets out to make sure its dead, but Jack Palance, standing nearby in his western shirt kills him.

At home some time later, Jimbuck (Palance) paints a crappy portrait of his wife, refusing to answer her innocuous questions with anything but steely brush-offs. Nevertheless, she is seduced and is somehow coerced into a lovemaking montage with the sandpapery Palance.

Receiving a call from his contractor, Mafioso Max Andreiotti (Rod Steiger), Jimbuck finds that his next hit is to be his old buddy Dr. Bob Michaels played by Bo Svenson.

Later, Bob and Jimbuck race around the mountains in their fancy sports cars and over some drinks Jimbuck comes clean. Insults accusations and dull dialogue are unleashed, and when Jimbuck storms out, Bob sticks around to pressure Jimbucks wife into another raspy sex montage.

You would think that catching the two of them going at it would seal the deal for old Jimbuck, who seems like he’s just about to nuke the whole world anyway, but nope. He refuses to make the kill, instead tracking down the hit contractor; one fake accented “black-pimp” caricature Richard Roundtree as “Coco”. There is a gunfight in which it is difficult to see anything, and Jimbuck returns to Mafioso’s house to beg for a way out of the lifestyle.
An awkward strip club scene is inserted here to fill out the boob-quotient, and the whole movie is played again in a quick yellow flashback. Which leaves me wondering; why, if they can edit all the garbage out of this shit for a 90 second montage, did they expect anyone to sit through the whole boring hour and a half just to see a bunch of rich snobby racist white people drinking champagne?