I actually got to watch two respectably good movies this time!

Lonely Hearts

(2006)

Lonely Hearts is a loosely historical treatment of Raymond Martinez and Martha Beck, serial killers who preyed on lonely women back in the late 1940s. They were eventually caught, convicted after a 44-day trial, and executed in New York's electric chair.  Lonely Hearts is the fourth film to portray the killers fictionally. The first was The Honeymoon Killers (1970), a pseudo-docudrama which identified the killers by their real names. The second was also called Lonely Hearts, a 1991 roman a clef starring Eric Roberts and Beverly D'Angelo. The third was Deep Crimson, a Spanish-language roman a clef from Mexico, which was nominated for 15 Ariel awards in 1997, winning eight.

Of the four films, the new version of Lonely Hearts is the only one to incorporate the perspective of the detectives who worked on the case. In fact the writer/director of the film, Todd Robinson, is the grandson of the lead detective from New York, and used his own grandmother's scrapbook for research, and to form the montage behind the opening credits. Given his special relationship to the subject matter, especially from the perspective of the investigating officers, one would assume that his version of the story would be the least romanticized, and the most loyal to the facts of the case. One would be wrong.

One example should be sufficient to illustrate the casual relationship between this script and reality. The real Martha Beck was a 233-pound woman so physically repulsive that the first man who got her pregnant tried to commit suicide rather than to contemplate a life with her. So who did Robinson recruit to play that role? Kathy Bates? Rosie O'Donnell? Nah. He picked the notoriously disgusting Salma Hayek. Mind you, Ray Martinez was a bunco artist who originally met Martha and all of his potential marks through personal ads. Does Salma seem like a woman who would need to advertise in the paper to get worthwhile dates? The rest of Ray's known real-life victims were also physically unappealing, as you might expect, all of them desperate enough to be ripe for seduction by a young, handsome con artist. Their fictional equivalents were filled by attractive women. The woman who was bludgeoned to death by Martha in a fit of jealousy when she saw her naked with Ray was actually a 66-year-old spinster, the type with sensible shoes and thick glasses. That role was assigned to elegant Alice Krige, who was a classy 52 and damned attractive, sexy enough to fan the flames of much younger men.

In addition to the glamorized casting choices, the script skirted reality in other ways. It assigned murders to the couple which they did not commit. It changed the details of some they did commit. But it stayed close to the facts on some other murders. It completely changed the circumstances of the couple's arrest. It omitted some of the juiciest details, like the fact that Ray believed that his power over women was attributable to his expertise in voodoo, or that fact that Ray was a normal guy with a nice family in Spain and a great record of service to the allies in WW2 until a freak accident nearly crushed his skull and caused some pathological personality changes. One of the most interesting details of the real story is that the obese Martha Beck was a highly competent nurse who finished first in her nursing class and was consistently promoted in record times. After her conviction, Martha was aghast at her treatment in the New York tabloids, which ridiculed her unsightly appearance just as her classmates once had, so she wrote sensitive, literate letters of protest to the editors from death row! Underneath her corpulent exterior, she was an extremely capable and competent woman who desperately longed to be loved, and achieved that longing by latching on to a crazy fraud, whereupon the two of them brought out the worst in each other.

If you don't care about historical accuracy, and just treat this as a fictional noir with a vague historical backdrop, ala Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, you may enjoy some of the eccentric characters and the lurid details of casual sex and cold-blooded murder. Unfortunately, the interesting (if sometimes imaginary) details about the lives of the killers are only half of the story. The rest of it is about some cops in New York eating donuts, arguing among themselves, and adapting to problems with their families and girlfriends. The film plods slowly when the cops are on screen, perhaps because it concentrates on their irrelevant personal interactions rather than their crime-solving.

Here's a tip for you youngsters. If you're going to write a script about famous people who were involved in violent incidents, like the Lonely Hearts Killers or George "Superman" Reeves, your audience is going to go to your movie to see those famous people. Don't devote half of your running time to some detectives who are working out their soap opera problems and talking to their kids about getting paper routes. It doesn't matter whether the detectives are real or fictional. Nobody cares about them. It doesn't even matter if the lead detective was your grandfather. The only difference that makes is that one person cares about them instead of none. And that does no good because I assume you are not going to pay for a ticket.

The film has plenty of star power. In addition to the beautiful Hayek, Barbarino and Tony Soprano are hanging around as the homicide detectives. Despite those famous names, and an obviously substantial budget, the studio virtually gave up on the film. It was in a mere 24 theaters exactly a year ago, and it grossed a whopping $188,000.

The least famous of the four stars, Jared Leto, turned out to be the one guy in the production who seemed to care about historical accuracy, and he created a Ray Martinez who seemed to be a perfect evocation of the killer I have read about. There are other positives besides Leto's performance: nice production values; interesting period details; good cinematography. The film looks impressively good, to the point where I could have forgiven the inaccuracies in the killer half of the story if there hadn't been so much boredom in the cop half. Unfortunately, the combination of those two factors means that Lonely Hearts is just an OK flick that seems like it should have been much better.

---

Background reading:

• Court TV's detailed summary, thorough and excellent as always.
• The Serial Killer Database
• Wikipedia

IMDb 6.6, Metacritic 60, Positive Reviews: 50%. I think those scores give the right general idea about the film, that it's a very professional effort which just doesn't have that much appeal.

 

Nudity

Film clips	Samples
Alice Krige (samples right)
Shannon Murphy (samples right)
Salma Hayek (no nudity, but hey, it's Salma Hayek)

Teeth

Teeth is a horror/comedy film about the ancient myth of vagina dentata, a coochie with razor-sharp teeth that destroy anything which attempts to pass through. The story is not related with the tone of either a comedy or a horror film, but rather with the charm of a sensitive, offbeat coming-of-age film. What would a girl's life be like if the worst thing about puberty were not her first period, but rather how to control the teeth within her genitals? That may be a far-fetched premise, but the writer/director followed it through its natural course to its logical conclusion.

Dawn is a sweet, sincere girl, an honor student and one of those "vow of abstinence" types. She forms her first crush on a nice boy, they go for a swim, things progress nicely and they make out quite modestly - until she wants to stop and he doesn't. Soon his dick is being eaten by the crabs. Not much later, so is he.

Dawn can't quite figure out what's going on, so she goes to a gynecologist. He's kind of a sleazebag, and it's not long before he's missing several fingers. At that point Dawn figures that any penetration into her genitalia will result in disaster, but it turns out that the teeth only appear during unwelcome penetration. She warms to another boy, and when the mood turns to romance, she warns him that he may not survive, or at least his dick may not. Teenage boys being what they are, he's willing to take that risk, and Dawn is surprised when they have tooth-free sex. She concludes that the teeth only come out when she's not co-operating fully. Her theory is confirmed when she goes another round with the same guy.  During the second copulation he takes a phone call which shows that he bet his best friend he could get into Dawn's drawers. This news is not received well by Dawn nor by her shark-like coochie, which instantly claims another victim.

Dawn finally comes to the conclusion that she can use her mutation as a gift rather than a curse. Maybe "gift" isn't exactly the right word here. "Weapon" might be more like it. At that point the tone shifts. The film stops being a sensitive coming-of-age film about a naive girl and jumps directly into genre territory, but we don't really object when Dawn gets nasty because the nastiness is brief and the victims get what they deserve.

I like this odd, sometimes almost surreal little film. Good production design and a truly odd sense of humor make this a very watchable, albeit eccentric movie. Imagine a cross between Napoleon Dynamite and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Except weirder.

Jess Weixler is unbelievably, heartbreakingly cute. She's Heather Graham minus 15 years, with smaller breasts. (Weixler actually turns 27 next month, but looks younger.) Film clip here. Samples right.

Naked Lies

1998

A so called action thriller for today with "Naked Lies." Shannon Tweed stars, so you know where we are headed. Actually Shannon is a little stingy with the nudity here, by her standard -  breasts only, but she still had a killer body. Caps and four clips.

 

Some pretty nice T & A from Mineko Mori with caps and four clips.

Ricarda Edelsbacher gives up all the goodies in these caps and 3 clips.

Pics

Sarah Alexander in The Armstrong and Miller show

One more of Daisy Fuentes. (Same as an earlier one, except "shopped")

Film Clips

Career review: Maruschka Detmers

• First Name Carmen, 1983, age 20

• La Pirate, with Jane Birkin, 1984, age 21

• La Vengeance du serpent a plumes, 1984, age 21

• Via Mala, 1985, age 22

• The Devil in the Flesh, 1986, age 23

• The Mambo Kings, 1992, age 29

• The Shooter, 1995, age 32

• Hidden Assassin, 1995, age 32

• Te quiero, 2001, age 38

• Mere fille mode d'emploi, 2002, age 39

• Mata Hari, 2003, age 40