On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen MARKETING LEMONS BY ROBERTASAHINA JL* JL.ow a film is promoted and distributed can reveal a great deal. Take the horror movie campaigns. They are a plague on the airwaves, attacking...
...Nina is supposedly hiding in the trunk of a car scheduled to be used in the final scene of the film-within-the-film...
...What difference indeed...
...Thus, amovie promoted with the slogan, "They thought they had buried her forever," was bound to suck me in...
...A complicated and utterly arbitrary cat-and-mouse game ensues, with the two men fighting over nothing more important than who is using whom...
...Those ads really should ask, "An interesting story...
...By the time the evil mummy finally revives, the movie has long since died...
...Eli puts Cameron, the rest of the cast and crew and the audience through one outrageous hoop after another...
...The answer would be that it's pretty dull...
...The murderer has been reduced to a madman, the policeman has been demoted from commander to sergeant, and even the precinct has been shifted from the East to the West Side of Manhattan...
...Of course, she isn't really trapped, and she actually does love Cameron...
...The distributors' awareness of the filmmakers' uncertain attitude toward their own material is given away by a warning included in the ads for Motel Hell: "You might just die—laughing...
...Motel Hell by contrast, is never boring...
...When the car crashes off a bridge into a river in accordance with the original scenario, though not with the lovers' plan, we're supposed to feel anxious about that helpless girl locked in the back of the slowly sinking vehicle...
...The Awakening is based on a deservedly obscure story by Bram Stoker about an evil Egyptian queen and the eminent English scholar unearthing her tomb...
...The changes in the film adaptation crudely flatten the psychological and sociological structure of the novel, leaving no trace of what made it a better than average best-seller...
...The ads ask, "A True Story...
...In fact, the landscape shots take up so much footage that the unexplained psychic phenomena, mysterious and gory deaths, and all the usual thrills of the genre do not begin until the film is practically over...
...You have probably seen those television spots for films that have been "showcased" (distributed to hundreds of theaters for a simultaneous nationwide opening) or "fourwalled" (released to practically any dark room with four walls and heavily advertised on the tube...
...The showcasing release pattern is a tacit acknowledgement that the distributors feared The First Deadly Sin would be a loser...
...Never mind that Eli's project— supposedly an arty antiwar statement —is so clearly a campy hack job that it hardly seems worth anyone's bothering...
...Mad farmer Vincent markets prize-winning smoked meats, spiced up with a special ingredient: the human flesh of drifters, runaways, and meddling local officials who have been buried for a spell in his "secret garden...
...If I sound somewhat passionate about the whole matter, I must confess that I am hopelessly addicted to late-night television ads and low-budget movies...
...Vincent dies with a chainsaw embedded in his side after a grisly climactic battle, but throughout the fight he has been wearing a pig's head, so the blood and violence provokes queasy laughter rather than terror...
...Demme and Goldman might at least have invented a more compelling yarn...
...Meanwhile, Cameron and his new love, Nina, the leading lady, conspire to escape from the production and the dictatorial director...
...Hardly a ringing endorsement for a horror film...
...There is no real plot logic, only empty sleights of hand and manic mechanical engineering...
...Horror movies in particular never contain the chills promised in the televised teasers...
...With this kind of inanity, it is more charitable to pity the distributors than despise their wares...
...The First Deadly Sin was showcased even though it is based on a recent best-seller and stars Frank Sinatra, Faye Dunaway and other well-known actors...
...We are privy to his difficulties with his wife turned topless dancer turned ex-wife, and to his pathetic ambitions...
...They are a plague on the airwaves, attacking their victims, mostly insomniacs, like deadly microbes...
...but nothing in the movie is likely to help answer that irrelevant question...
...The movie begins with Dummar picking up a derelict in the desert and giving him a ride into Las Vegas...
...It congratulates itself on its own stunts while letting the audiences in on enough of the jokes for them to preen themselves on their superior powers of perception...
...That should hardly be surprising, since four-walled movies are long on promise and short on plot and characterization, not to mention acting and directing...
...It languished in the can for several years, then opened last summer on the West Coast to rave reviews...
...He wants to write songs, be "Milkman of the Month" at the dairy where he drives a truck, own a gas station, and win money on a game show...
...Distributors are also worried about Melvin and Howard, which opened at the New York Film Festival, played for a few weeks in Manhattan and is now in release across the country...
...If she loves you, she's still there," one character announces without telling us or Cameron how he came to know about the escape plan...
...Distributor uncertainty is not limited to horror films...
...Some ancient curse related to the queen's incest with her father, and a romantic triangle involving the archaeologist, his wife and his young female assistant add to the confusion...
...In the book, pride is the sin afflicting both the killer who terrorizes Manhattan and the cop who tracks him...
...The feeble climax of The Stunt Man should give an idea of how the filmmakers crudely withhold information in order to heighten the suspense and keep the plot wheels grinding along...
...The film was intended as a vehicle for Sinatra, but the character of the policeman in Lawrence Sanders' novel bears no resemblance to Sinatra's well-worn screen persona—the weary idealist, the outsider working within the system...
...There is a magic quality to The Awakening though: It manages to pack at least four hours of tedium into a little under two hours...
...Neither motive is believable, but that does not stop the trickery from escalating...
...Yet they are visible to the naked eye...
...Silly, yes, but I expected as much from advertisements proclaiming, "It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent fritters...
...Occasionally the humor of Motel Hell makes for a few uneasy moments...
...A modest man...
...V JL» reshman philosophy bromides about truth and falsehood, reality and illusion are dusted off in The Stunt Man, another film that has a curious release pattern...
...As usual, everything works out in a happy ending...
...This fall it was shown in first-run theaters in New York, where it was promptly hailed by Pauline Kael, and it is currently on view nationally in neighborhood movie houses...
...None of these interesting dimensions are in the screenplay...
...When he is accused, predictably, of trying to play God, Farmer Vincent is slightly bewildered: "I wouldn't know how to," he replies...
...Once confined to late-night and local programing, such enticements now infect even prime time and the major network shows...
...It is the tale of Melvin Dummar, the man to whom Howard Hughes supposedly left a fortune in the "Mormon will...
...We never know if she is in there when the shooting starts...
...Anyone who has succumbed and bought a ticket to one of the touted films knows that he saw its best parts in the ads, for free...
...Eli Cross, the controversial director of the movie-within-the-movie, covers up the death of his valued stunt man by hiring as a replacement a fugitive Vietnam veteran named Cameron, who has no training in films...
...The film groans from one implausible scene to the next as Eli contrives still more preposterous and extravagant stunts...
...Cameron plans to steal the auto and run away with her, rather than finish the sequence...
...his prey kills to excel at a bizarre, ugly enterprise and set himself apart from the rest of the world...
...I suppose the filmmakers cast Charleton Heston as the Egyptologist because they figured that anyone who had played Moses would at least be familiar with the terrain...
...they sought to overcome our resistance by surrounding us with it...
...The cop feels that his turf has been violated and that, despite department and outside political pressures, he alone can nab the mass murderer...
...One suspects that the idea behind their media blitzes is to gull as many unsuspecting moviegoers as possible before word spreads that nationwide consumer fraud is being perpetrated...
...What could have been an interesting look at catastrophically sudden fame and fortune is turned into a blue-collar soap opera...
...If not, what difference does it make...
...Unfortunately, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman manage to somehow get lost in the details of Dummar's rather mundane existence...
...The Stunt Man, directed by Richard Rush and written by Lawrence B. Marcus, is a manipulative middle-brow movie...
...Eli exploits the fugitive so that he can finish his project cheaply and on schedule, and Cameron exploits the director to elude his pursuers...
...Dummar doubts the bum's claim to be Howard Hughes and quickly forgets the episode until much later in the film, when the delivery of the will transforms him into an instant celebrity and an unwilling participant in a complicated legal battle over the estate...
...there is no reason for anyone to care about its veracity...
...It is easy to see why...
...None of this has anything to do with Hughes, however...
...No disappointment is too great or too recent to curb my lust for the next piece of trash shrilly announced to be "opening Friday at your neighborhood theater...
...The distributor's initial hesitancy was fully justified...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 21
