Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

When film enthusiasts debate the great screen actors, Don Johnson's name is rarely mentioned, but I doubt if Kenneth Branagh or Robert DeNiro could have done any more with this schlocky thriller than Johnson did. The role required smooth, stunning looks, smug self-centeredness, insincerity, and the heart of a snake masked by a thin patina of sexy and superficial charm. You might say Johnson was born to play this part. I don't know anything about what Mr Johnson is really like, but when it comes to his screen persona, Johnson is to snaky insincerity as Robin Williams is to gooey sentiment, and he has a special type of ophidian charm different from that exhibited by similar actors. Hugh Grant, for example, plays "insincere and shallow" with the best of them, but we always suspect that beneath his superficial, womanizing, immature persona there is a nice person at the core, one who masks his innate vulnerability with his quips and his aloof facade. There is no such indication with Johnson's characters. We suspect that beneath his serpentine exterior is a real serpent.

Johnson plays a gigolo who is accused of killing his incredibly rich wife. Still being sought by police, he strolls boldly into a brilliant female lawyer's office and cajoles her into defending him. She believes in his innocence at first, but as she progresses through the case, she realizes that Johnson is guilty, and is some kind of dangerous psychotic who kills women when he's finished with them. Worst of all, she sees that she is setting herself up to be his next target. She tries to resign as his lawyer, but the process is so far along that the court orders her to stay and provide the best defense possible. Ostensibly, she does, but behind the scenes she calculates how the crime was committed and recreates the evidence Johnson has destroyed. Johnson is floored when the police find evidence that he knows he destroyed, but when he thinks it through, he deduces exactly what has happened, because there is an incorrect detail in the physical evidence, forcing the conclusion that the evidence is manufactured, not discovered. Not having been there, the lawyer was not able to think through every little detail, and her mistake leads Johnson to realize where the evidence must have come from, and to formulate a counter-plan.

The suspense in the movie is from the cat and mouse game played by the lawyer (Rebecca DeMornay) and Johnson, each of whom must constantly try to think a step ahead of the other, or die. If she hopes to stay alive, DeMornay has a lot of catching up to do, since it turns out that Johnson has been planning the entire sequence of events for years, including her own participation.

Although it is a typical A-list Hollywood courtroom thriller with contrived plotting and characterizations (5.4 at IMDb) and is largely forgotten after only a decade, it is certainly slick enough. This film was directed by the great Sydney Lumet who, for the thirty years from 1959 to 1988, directed some of the most important American films, including two of the greatest courtroom dramas (12 Angry Men, and The Verdict). Lumet has three films in the IMDb Top 250.

Guilty as Sin is rated 30th of Lumet's 35 graded films. (For trivia buffs, The Wiz is rated lowest.)

If you are wondering why Guilty as Sin isn't better with Lumet behind it, well, look no farther than some of the other scripts from screenwriter Larry Cohen:

While Guilty as Sin was a career lapse for Lumet, it was on Cohen's highlight reel. Lumet has never directed any film rated below 4.6, but Cohen has written 16 below 5.0, including all the It's Alive films and all the Maniac Cop films. Astoundingly, Cohen scripted a film rated 7.6 (Phone Booth) in 2002, despite never having scripted a film rated higher than 6.2 in his previous forty years in the industry.

This film is a C by our system. Typical Hollywood formula suspense story, in which one-dimensional characters often do things contrary to their own self-interest, simply because the script requires them to do so. It is watchable because of Sydney Lumet's direction and Don Johnson's oily "man you love to hate" portrayal.

All I can say is Roger Corman should have been French. Instead of being considered a grade-b schlockmeister, he'd be known as The French Kubrick.

The story begins with Norman Bates, an aspiring sculptor, waking up in a Paris hotel room with blood on his hands and no memory of the previous four days. Desperate for help, he calls his old university philosophy professor and asks him to lend an analytical eye to his life, to help him determine if he is a killer, or insane, or both, or neither.

The professor accepts an invitation to the lavish country estate where Norman grew up. Norman's dad (Orson Welles) is approximately the richest man on the planet, and during his years in the French countryside, he chose to alleviate his loneliness by raising two orphan children whom he found. Orson raised the children together as brother and sister, then adopted the orphan boy as his son, and the orphan girl as ... his wife. Thus was the little girl suddenly promoted from Norman's sibling to his stepmother.

Norman Bates has already confessed to the professor that he has had an ongoing affair with his stepsister/stepmother, and that he is being blackmailed by a mysterious stranger who will tell ol' Orson about the affair unless he gets some substantial sums in cash. Norman is afraid that if Orson finds out about the affair, he will take drastic action against the lovers, and this might even include serving wine before its time.

The professor doesn't really care if all these people kill and swindle each other but, as a Frenchman, he can't allow the wine desecration, so he agrees to attempt to piece together the mystery during his time at the estate, trying to determine the mystery of the bloody hands as well as the identity of the blackmailer.

Essentially, the film is a four character stage play based upon an Ellery Queen story. Ellery Queen is the pseudonym of two New York authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, for you trivia buffs) whose mysteries became the basis of many movies and TV series. Unfortunately, instead of playing out like a mystery, this story unravels as a Greek Tragedy with Orson as Zeus and his "children" taking up various mythological themes. (For example, there is the obvious Oedipus/Electra element, and the symbol of Orson's head on the statue of Jupiter which Norman Bates is carving and eventually destroys.)

Ol' Norman acts stranger in this film than in he did Psycho or Crimes of Passion, and he wears one of the strangest wardrobes ever conceived. According to one of Orson's pompous speeches, they all seek to remain permanently frozen in 1928, so Norman runs around in his best Gatsby clothing. More accurately, he dressed as Gatsby would have dressed if he had been a flaming queen. Welles himself wears those same plus-sized bow ties that he would later seem to wear on every talk show in America, as if he truly just stepped out of his Paul Masson commercials. For some inexplicable reason, Welles wore a false nose even though he was, in all other respects, simply just being Orson Welles. I can't fathom why he did that, since it was not very different from his own nose, but the truly uncomfortable part of it is that the nose was green (pictured here)!

Director Claude Chabrol has a great reputation, but whatever talent he had was rarely on display in this film. The atmosphere is drab, the pacing glacial, and a sense of smooth narrative is completely missing. It's such a dull movie that my mind kept wandering, and I had to go back over scenes to pick up on missing details. There are three or four sudden plot twists during the denouement and explanation of the mystery, and that solution was actually fairly clever, but in order to get to that point in the film, you'd really have to want to. What little forward movement the film has is weighted down with the slow pace and gravitas of classical drama, incredibly slow and breathy line recitations by Orson, heavy-handed symbolism, Biblical allusions, and pretentious pseudo-psychology.

Chabrol is not wowing us at the Fun House. Tuna reviewed "Innocents With Dirty Hands" a few days ago, and despised it. I watched "The Unfaithful Wife" last week, and couldn't even come up with a reason to talk about it, other than it was remade as Unfaithful with Diane Lane.

I must say, however, that Ten Days' Wonder is your Holy Grail if you've always dreamed of seeing Norman Bates's bumhole and nutsack. And who hasn't?

In addition to Norman's hairy bum, you can also see Marlene Jobert's bottom, and a brief glimpse at one of her breasts.

Say what you want about those artistic mofo's like Atom Egoyan and Don McKellar, but the Snake Eater series represents the very zenith of Canadian cinema. As you have undountedly deduced from the title, this movie was the third of three in the Snake Eater series. The Snake Eaters are an elite Marine Corps unit, and Lorenzo Lamas used to be one of them.

... army of bikers with very polite Canadian accents (Hey, OK, maybe he's out there, eh?), and automatic weapons

One of the key bad bikers was played by wrestler Bam-Bam Bigelow. My theory is that they placed him in so many scenes with Lamas to make it seem that Lamas was a decent actor.

Fundamentally, these Snake Eater films are the Canadian equivalent of Charles Bronson movies, with plenty of vigilante justice, except that Lamas acts more like Burt Reynolds than Bronson. He's a good looking guy, makes plenty of sarcastic remarks and sees plenty of naked women.

I hate to admit it, but I enjoyed this movie in a real guilty pleasure kind of way. The filmmakers don't take this stuff seriously, and the film moves quickly with plenty of action and humor and nudity. I'd love to give it an F or something, but I have to be honest and say it's a C-, a film which you can enjoy if you're into seeing Burt Reynolds crossbred with Charles Bronson.

Here are the caps I made from Rascal Flatt's video "I Melt", the first country music video to show nudity. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) While they carefully kept any naughty bits from showing (of course, but it's a start!), there is some good stuff. Unfortunately the total nude stuff was in a dark, dark room. I have made adjustments to my video card to try to capture those better the next time around. I will send those on to you when I have them done tomorrow sometime. In the meantime, here are some caps from the video!

Other crap archives. May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's sorta in real time.