T.A.G. - The Assassination Game

NetFlix Not Available
DVD Purchase HERE for $8
IMDB 5.8/10
My Rating: 7/10

A campus newspaper reporter is drawn into a college game of TAG by his attraction to one of the players.  Through her, he becomes immersed in the world of play-killers and spies, until the two of them stumble into the path of a deranged murderer stalking the gamers.

Let's rewind to the early 80's, 1982 to be exact.  Back then, one of the raging controversies of the nation was WHAT to do about these satanic, suicide-provoking, heavy metal-infested role-playing games that were becoming so popular.  TV newscasters and sermonizers predictably freaked the fuck out and warned of impending social collapse if your kid was playing tabletop D&D with his buddies in the spare room - Never mind that you'd think it would be a parent's dream-come-true if their teen opted to stay home and do something that didn't involve drinking, drugs, or stoplight racing.  For a period of several years, we were bombarded with continual negative press regarding D&D, with the media seizing on every possible scare story to drum it it into a national issue.  Rona Jaffe's infamous "Mazes and Monsters" was an onerous example.  Today it's rightly considered a laughingstock by the RPG community, and looked back at much as we view Reefer Madness, but at the time people actually took this nonsense seriously.  In fact, I still attribute one of my earliest anti-religious jolts to a sermon I sat through where the preacher was ranting about the "satanic ills" of D&D while waving a copy of the Monster Manual in the air, howling, "There are DEMONS and WITCHES in here!"

Well, yes, but the same is true of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and for the same reason.

I vividly recall looking at the guy and thinking, "If this minister is so utterly, demonstrably clueless about what he considers a driving moral issue, WHY are we sitting here listening to him tell us how to live every Sunday?"  More potently, it was an example of just how stupid one can look if they get exercised about something that they have no understanding of.  I realize this is heavy stuff for a movie review, but it plays into why I enjoyed TAG so much at the time.

Alongside D&D, we also played a lot of Killer, one of the first live-action RPGs, in both high school and college.  Killer involved each player receiving the name of another player, their target, who they then had to stalk and "kill" with a toy gun until there was only one champion left.  As one can imagine, this was a blast.  TAG riffs on this concept with a group of college students cheerfully playing assassins. And while one of the players does go off the deep end, TAG was unusual at the time for portraying the players not as unstable, needy, friendless misfits, but rather as just ordinary kids looking for a little excitement.  This was so refreshing that I loved the movie to death, and it still remains a personal favorite of mine today.

The movie centers around a college newspaper reporter of the cigar-smoking, Chandler-reading, hopelessly romantic variety who has a mysterious encounter with Linda Hamilton, a player in TAG.  Ahh, Linda...

Linda Hamilton has never BEEN more gorgeous than she is in this movie, and she's able to convey a sort of sultry, film noir, femme fatale vibe that is far beyond her years.  She's just another player, a psych major who's looking for a fun time after hours, and our hero joins up with her because A) he is hopelessly smitten, and B) he is looking for a story for his newspaper.  This leads him, and the viewers, into the game world of TAG and we get to meet a lot of wildly varying players and the bizarro gamemaster who runs the show.  Speaking of, he's hilarious and steals his scenes effectively.  Anyone who's ever played a Killer-type game will recognize this guy immediately:

Our other main character is Gersh, the reigning TAG champion, played by Bruce Abbott (Yep, the Re-Animator guy) in his first starring role.  When an attempted shower assassination goes badly for him, our man Gersh goes off the deep end and begins taking his gaming way too seriously... murdering one student player after another and marking them off his "Kill" list until the inevitable face-off with Linda and Bruce.  Thankfully, it isn't played off as another god-awful "Gaming makes you unbalanced" message-movie - It's pretty obvious that Gersh is not all there from the start, and the game simply gives him a method for his madness.  The second half of the film is basically an 80's slasher with guns instead of knives as Gersh kills his way through the cast.

So why do I love it so much?  It was written and directed by genre legend Nick Castle, for starters, and the acting and dialog crackle with unusual energy and spice for a low budget flick.  You'll genuinely  like the characters and no one is there just to be a victim, a bimbo, or a hero.  Also, viewed from today's vantage point, it's a fascinating time capsule of college life before the days of cell phones, internet, and other electronica. Concerts, live action games, hanging around the student activity buildings, smoking cigars in dorm rooms... TAG gives us a microcosmic peek into the world of yesteryear's 20-something. After the college gun crimes of the past ten years, this is one movie that will never, EVER be remade today, so let's appreciate it for what it is - A look at a more innocent time when college students shooting each other was fodder for action-packed escapist adventure instead of the routine evening news.

PS - Special mention must be made of the opening credits sequence.  Most low budget flicks of the time were content with a simple credit roll, but this wasn't enough for Nick Castle and so we get an extended, swanky parody of a Bond opening, complete with rubber dart guns and LOTS of feathered hair (Skip ahead to the 1min, 50sec marker if you want to jump straight to the music):

Tranzor's "The Thing"

Recently I've been sending some time browsing at fanedit.org, a site dedicated to amateurs re-editing their favorite movies for various reasons - Sometimes improvement, sometimes drastic alteration, and sometimes just fun tinkering.  This is a case of the latter, and it's a generation-targeted nostalgia missile in the extreme.  You see, what fan editor "Tranzor" has done is not try to improve John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing in any way - Instead, he has transformed it into an edited-for-television late 70's Midnight Movie.

Before I go on, a word about legality.  Fan edits exist in a weird sort of murky grey zone in copyright law - It is legal to make them and it is legal to watch them and it is legal to own them... provided you actually own the original DVD as well.  So, while I can download this fan edit with impunity, someone who didn't own the original DVD would essentially be committing a file sharing copyright breach by downloading it, which is why I'm not posting any download links with this article.  If you want to see this yourself... Well, let's just say that Google is your friend.  That said, on with the show!

Remember the late night monster movie?  There was the news at 11, then Benny Hill or Monty Python, then some sort of late night horror movie in edited-for TV mode, usually something from the 50's.  For all the talk about the "grindhouse" theater experience, this sort of midnight movie had its own strange charms - Missing reels, terrible film quality, choppy cuts, dropped-out profanity, etc.  What this fan editor has done is to recreate this experience with The Thing.  The movie is reformatted into 4:3 and changed to B&W, with a few other tweaks here and there.  You know you're in for fun when you put the disc in...

Right after an intro that will throw you straight back to age 12, you start realizing that this is going to be a wholly different "Thing" viewing experience:

The funny thing about this is how GOOD the movie looks in black and white - The setting is pretty timeless and with the color and the cussing gone, you could almost think you were watching a genuine 1957 drive-in classic.  It's funny how some films time-travel well and others do not.  We were watching the original Alien the other night and it could have been shot last week - Other than some amusing computer nostalgia (A text-prompt green screen monitor on a starship), the look and style were timeless.  Compare it to something like Logan's Run, which immediately says, "1975-1978" really loudly.  I wouldn't have thought that The Thing could get more brooding, but then I saw it in B&W:

There's a great irony here that I've spent most of my adult life avoiding commercials, and yet the commercial breaks in this are the highlight of the experience.  You'll be totally into the movie and then it will hit a crisis point and BAM! - Commercial cutaway:

I haven't watched commercials since the day I got my first VCR - I'm a little hostile to the messages advertisers try to shout at us.  I don't mind informative advertising, but 99% of TV commercials amount to either, "Use our product or no one will ever have sex with you!" or, "Use our product because all our competition sucks."  Thanks, but no thanks.  However, in this case the nostalgia factor wins out, and I'm sitting there watching original 1977 commercial blocks all over again, filled with cheery disco music and ads for Tab cola.

Yes, Tab has even less calories than water.  Never knew THAT, did you, you fatty water drinkers...
Overall, this DVD is a blast, right down to its custom printable DVD case cover.  If you have fond memories of staying up for the late movie, then watching it in wide-eyed childish terror and running to the kitchen for snacks during the commercial breaks, then this is an experience to love.  If you were born after, say, 1978, then I suspect you'd only find this confusing - A bizarre re-edit of a great move for no understandable purpose.  Like the man says, ya just had to be there...

KFP salutes Forgotten Fiends - Dargent Peytraud

Everybody knows the big guys - Myers, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, Freddy.  They have their own franchises, their own toys, and worldwide recognition.  The KFP "Forgotten Fiend" awards, however, are dedicated to the guys who didn't end up with action figures...  Who were in only one movie and yet their presence was so memorable that they MADE the movie.  The ones about whom you go away thinking, "Damn, that was a great villain!"

My first entry into this category is this guy, Zakes Mokae.  Or as I will always remember him, Dargent Peytraud from The Serpent and the Rainbow, a favorite horror movie of mine and one of the few Wes Craven flicks that I actually like.  In Serpent, Peytraud is the Bad Guys' Bad Guy - Scheming, brilliant, devious, mischievous, and often downright terrifying.  Even more frightening is the fact that he personifies the sort of depersonalized, bored government sadism typical of despotic regimes and French administration.  He's not out to control the world, just to keep Haiti held together with an iron fist, and if you threaten to upset his applecart even one iota, hold onto your nuts!

I'm hard to scare in horror movies - The Exorcist girl did nothing for me, Freddy and Jason are just goofy, and the less said about franchise characters like Chucky and the Leprechaun, the better.  When I look back over my movie history, I can really only think of a few movie villains that genuinely creeped me out.  There was the Tall Man from Phantasm, Max Schreck in Nosferatu, the ghosts in The Fog, the original Michael Myers, that thing at the end of [REC], and a few others... and among them is Zakes Mokae's Peytraud, the guy who can say, "See you in your dreeeeeeems, blanc" and really mean it.

I love a lot of things about Peytraud.  I love the way he talks.  I love the way he says, "Dreeeems".  I love the way he depersonalizes the hero as merely, "Blanc"...  Just one more annoyance to be swatted out of the way, unless you really irritate him enough to give you his full attention, and you really, really don't want that.  Dracula might toss you around and drink your blood, and the Alien might spray acid on you, but Peytraud will hammer a nail through your testicles just to convince you he's serious.  Throughout the whole movie, he marvelously communicates the aura of the guy that you simply do NOT screw around with.

His sense of mounting menace helps.  At first meet, you think he's just a bureaucrat, pushing papers at the ministry and being suitably brusque to foreigners messing in his country.  But hero "Doctah Alan" finds out quickly that Peytraud is no pushover to be intimidated by the presence of an American in his Third World.  The interactions between Bill Pullman and Mokae are electric and Mokae dominates every scene he's in.  For the actors around him, it's like trying to do "Death of a Saleman" starring William Shatner - You just know that everyone's looking at THAT guy, no matter what you do.

Peytraud is no one dimensional comicbook villain, though.  Probably what makes him so memorably scary and so freaky is his sense of demented fun - Sending a voodoo ritual into chaos for idle kicks and making people into zombies just for the hell of it.  He's not just frightening when he hammers in that nail, he's enjoying it - This is him finally getting to unwind and have some good times.  And later, when the hero realizes there's just no escaping the guy...  That he's perfectly happy to reach across the world just to fuck with his mind...  Well, that really caps him off as an ideal villain.  When he notices you, run.

It's a shame we never saw this guy again.  Serpent was never going to be a franchise (This was back in the magical days when every single property that came out was not necessarily immediately vetted for franchise and toy marketing potential).  But that's probably best - Overexposure would only have diluted his menace and malice, Freddy Krueger-style, until he became a shadow of his original self.  I'm quite happy that he's a perfect one-time villain and he can easily stand alongside the famous "movie monsters".  I can say with certainty that I would MUCH rather have to face off with Jason than Peytraud.  At least Jason will only kill me.  So thanks, Zakes, for giving us one of the best underappreciated villains in horror films!

And if you want to see a clip of just what makes this guy so amazing, watch and shudder.  He wants to hear you SCREEEM, blanc.

Chime.in

Battle beyond the Stars (1980)

NetFlix 2.9/5
IMDB 5.1/10
My Rating: 5/10

A young hero must voyage into the galaxy with his talking organic space ship to recruit mercenaries who can save his peaceful planet from the war-mongering armadas of Sador.

Back in 1980, we were still basking in the warm afterglow of the Millenium Falcon, in the heady days when Star Wars was THE coolest space franchise in existence and George Lucas was a trusted god to young lads all over America as the distiller of our dreams.  Star Wars ripoffs were being rushed to the drive-ins as fast as they got back from the Fotomat, and it seemed like every weekend had some new Space/Star/Blasters/Quest film running at the dollar matinee.  Into this mix came Battle beyond the Stars, from none other than B movie legend Roger Corman.  I'll probably be lynched by nostalgia-soaked fans of Shad and Nell, but I have to be honest - I thought it was a pretty incredibly goofy movie at age 14 and time has not been kind to it.  That said, it is still a hoot to watch for its pure insanity and I guarantee you won't go away unhappy, at least.

The basic plot is thus - Intergalactic bad man Sador (Hammed to the hammiest by a gloating John Saxon) comes to innocent, hippy-esque planet Akir to demand that they surrender or die.  The natives of Akir have no weapons and live by some sort of nonviolent code so it's a wonder they aren't invaded every week, but there you go...  We don't spend a lot of time on Akir, which is a shame because every panorama of the planet looks like a 70's album cover and I kept wanting to flip the TV screen open so I could read the cosmic lyrics and wonder at all the mystical new harmonies and coded meanings in the songs, man.

Alas, right off the bat we're visited by the floating Blue Head of Death, otherwise known as John Saxon, and there's some random killing and chaos just to ensure no one laughs at the giant head in the sky.  Sador gives everyone time to surrender before he destroys the planet, and an emergency council convenes to send idealistic young Frodo, err, Shad, off on an adventure to save the world!

Shad's quest will take him all over the universe in search of skilled mercenaries to defend his planet, but let's pause for a moment and bump right up on the movie's weirdest casting, hero Shad, otherwise (and inescapably) known as John-Boy Walton.  Like William Shatner and Captain Kirk, Richard Thomas was John-Boy, the naive but well-meaning writer/countryboy from Waltons' Mountain.  Modern generations have likely never even seen the Waltons so it won't be a problem for them, but for those of us in the theaters in 1980, it was like casting Ernest T. Bass as Ben Kenobi...  Just one long, open-jawed, "What were they thinking?"  The unknown Mark Hamill could embody every young lad's aspirations, but Shad was...  John-Boy.

Stepping past that, Shad ventures forth in a talking spaceship named Nell to have his adventure.  Nell is a female ship.  Nell is a very female ship.  I'd love to have been present in the design stages of this to hear whose idea it was to, hey, "Try sticking some breasts on that space ship, and maybe make the rest of it look like a skinned rabbit".  Nell may possibly be the most unusual looking spaceship in film history.

Shad explores the galaxy in his skinless talking space organ and this is the meat of the movie, pardon the pun...  It's Magnificent Seven in space, as he recruits badass after badass to come save Akir.  Robert Vaughn, Sybil Danning, George Peppard, and various actors in rubber alien masks all sign up for the cause.  Robert Vaughn gets special credit for his portrayal of world-weary mercenary Gelt, who has the wealth of planets but no safe place he can relax over a meal.  Sybil Danning, by contrast, gets notice for managing to keep her marginal clothes attached for the entire movie, and how she accomplishes this magnificent feat is anyone's guess (IMDB says lots of hidden sticky tape was involved).  Her character is loads of fun - A fearsome space Valkyrie out to prove herself, and I suspect a lot of young lads had their first case of lust/crush when she appeared back in 1980.

Once the crew is assembled it's non-stop action to the end as all and sundry take on the imperial fleet of Sador.  Star Wars, it is not, but for a $2 million dollar budget, it's an amazing accomplishment.  The space battles are fun, the alien makeup is wonderfully cheesy, and the whole thing is infused with that sense of, "Well, why not throw in a talking alligator?" that made so many of the 70's drive-in films so deliriously enjoyable.  Battle beyond the Stars might not have been the next Star Wars (It had the dire misfortune of coming out in the same year as Empire Strikes Back), but as late night TV entertainment, it's definitely worth seeing.

Looker

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 6.5/10


This ran on HBO a million times back in the early 80's, but I hadn't seen it since until last night. It was panned when it came out for being too unrealistic and unbelievable, and not as good as Crighton's previous film "Westworld", but I think it was more a case of "Looker" just being too far ahead of its time. It's so cute to think that there was a time when we thought the idea of a massive media corporation using digital imagery on TV to manipulate the truth and strobe/brainwash consumers into buying & voting for the products of their choice was too weird to be believable. "Looker" is an odd duck - It's a slow paced mystery/suspense/science fiction/black comedy satire.

Albert Finney plays a renowned LA plastic surgeon who starts seeing beautiful models turn up in his office with lists of defects to correct - " My nose needs to be adjusted 2mm to the left". The incredible minuteness of these corrections gets his curiosity up, but he's happy to do the work until the models start dying in random ways. This kicks off a mystery involving computer full-body imaging and a mysterious form of "time stopping" used as a weapon.

I thought it was a lot of fun. The story could have been more consistent and tighter, and the Partridge Family girl just doesn't look like a perfect model, but overall it was a good watch. James Coburn and Albert Finney both have great presence as two canny old guys engaging in wary battles of wits. And the flashy thing preceded "Men in Black"s idea by nearly 20 years. Back in 1981, in the world of TRS-80 computer graphics, it may have been hard to imagine replacing television personalities with perfect CGI duplicates, but today's world of bunny suits proves yet again that Crighton was simply way ahead of his class in future prediction (Given Japanese advances in sexbots, does anyone *really* doubt there will be something like Westworld pleasure models one of these days?)

Solid flick, very underrated IMO. The ahead-of-its-time nature is perfectly summed up in this speech by villainous corporate mogul James Coburn:

"Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power. "

Enjoyed it very much. 6.5/10

Suggested Accompaniment: A glass of sweet wine wine and an ecig/epipe device, preferably with one of the many dessert flavors available, perhaps some kind of caramel or toffee.  It's a techie movie that calls for a techie smoke, making an electronic cigarette an ideal viewing companion.