Burying Art Alive In ’Avalanche’







Burying Art Alive In ’Avalanche’

Washington Post, The (DC) - September 23, 1978
Author: Gary Arnold

After theater managers add up the receipts, "Quarantine" may seem a more appropriate title for "Avalanche," an inept disaster melodrama now at several obliging, unlucky locations. This fizzled brain-storm from New World, Roger Corman ’s production company looks like a cinch for the first supplement to "The 50 Worst Films of All Time."

Not that "Avalanche" is the sort of terrible movie that cries out to be seen. It lacks the irresistible> transcendent foolishness of the bombastic, egomaniacal duds like "Exorcist II" and "The Trial of Billy Jack" and "Viva Knievel."

Basically a marvel of disorganized exposition and cut-rate disaster effects, "Avalanche" is a low-yield bomb-out.

Given Corman’s reputation for thrift. "Avalanche" poses a kind of chicken-or-the egg mystery did someone in the organization actually consider it timely to slap together a quickie imitation of "Earthquake" and "Airport 75" set at a ski resort in the Rockies? Or did Corman just have some winter sports footage gathering dust and decide that it had to be integrated into a feature at any cost?

Whaever the motives, the result is a shambles. The plot ostensibly a romantic triangle involving Rock Hudson as a dynamic resort developer, Mia Farrow as his on-again, off-again ex-wife and Robert Forster as a rugged outdoorsman never gets off the dime. Ditto for the "subplot" a shameless appropriation of the Spider Sabich-Claudine Donget case with Rick Moses cast as a philandering superskier and cathey Paine as his hysterically jealous girlfriend. Mercifully, the avalanche gets them before they can get each other.

After lurching between expository fragments and winter sports fragments without conveying the faintest illusion that anything of consequence has been depicted, the filmmakers turn to the avalanche in the vain hope that it might bury their mistakes. Instead, it compounds them.

The disaster footaage is faked so poorly that there never appears to be a pictorial connection between the rampaging snow - sometimes falling down real mountains at other times down miniature sets or in tacky optical shots - and the sites and characters it’s supposed to pulverize.

The disaster is reputed to begin when an off-course private plane plows into a snow-capped peak. The alleged destruction seems to cover an indefinably vast area. For all one knows, all of Colorado could be in the path of this elusive cataclysm. Extras keep screaming under the shower of falling snow, but it’s impossible to tell precisely where it came from and how it gets from one victim to the next. TR 3 avalanche

Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow aren’t exactly box-office giants these days, but they’re a little too well-known to lend their floundering, embarrassed presences to a down-and-outer as derelict as "Avalanche." You expect a movie this punk to star names like Edward Obscure and Lana Nobody. Or maybe Rick Moses and Cathey Paine.

’Psychic’ Shivers

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’Psychic’ Shivers


Washington Post, The (DC) - May 1, 1979


Author: Gary Arnold


"The Psychic," on the whole an uneven experiment in terror, had as unheralded an opening as any movie in Washington.Audiences who took potluck on it, however, were probably agreeably surprised by some genuinely clever touches and reflectively sustained shivers.

According to the minimal advertising material available, "The Psychic" was directed by someone named Lucio Fulci , who transcends his overdramatic mannerisms to reveal a talent for orchestrating pictorial suspense. Fulci hits his stride in the last reel or so, when Jennifer O’Neill, evidently lingering in Italy after "The Innocent" and cast as the clairvoyant heroine, is stalked from one old dark premises to another by the killer whose past and future crimes she has envisioned.

Although Fulci plants intriguing clues to the showdown-a shattered wall mirror, a wooden floor lamp with a huge red shade, a yellow-papered cigarette smoldering in a blue ash-tray, a hint of entombment borrowed from Poe’s "Cask of Amontillado"-much of the early exposition requires patience. The sound has the sepulchral quality of Italian post-dubbing. One must also put up with repetitive visual hokum, particularly shots boring in for a look at O’Neill’s all-seeing eyes.

But once the heroine embarks unwittingly on her final rendezvous with the murderer-clairvoyance conveniently fails her at this juncture to make a spine-tingling conclusion possible-Fulci demonstrates a masterful command of timing, mood and seductively menacing images. He seems to turn the corner during a passage that recalls Martin Balsam’s ill-fated walk up the staircase in "Psycho." In this case O’Neill, summoned to a murder house by a possible informant, begins mounting a wide, shadowy staircase and halts at the sight of blood slowly drip, drip, dripping onto the steps from the floor above. When she looks up, the sequence is off and running for perhaps 20 minutes of wittily elaborated hide-and-seek.

Like Dario Argento, the talented but excessive director of horror films like "Suspiria" and "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage," the obscure Fulci seems to have more stuff than he often needs. Still, it’s more amusing and rewarding to play along with the excesses of enthusiasm in a Fulci than to wait for a laborious tease, like John Carpenter of the grossly overrated "Halloween," to get his scare-show off the dime.

One could imagine many other actresses supplying a more entertaining performance as a threatened psychic than O’Neill does. Fulci uses her beautiful but usually impassive face as a decorative object in compositions where darkness and threatening emblems appear to be closing in on its luminous surface.

The little detail of the wristwatch given the heroine by a friend is essential. The timepiece proves one of the more delightful props ever exploited in a movie thriller. It plays a critical role on two occasions in the closing minutes, the second cueing a stunning freeze-frame fade-out.

Cut! Print It! (Scenes From 'The Boogey Man')







Cut! Print It! (Scenes From 'The Boogey Man')

Washington Post, The (DC) - September 23, 1980
Author: Gary Arnold

No historic opportunity will be lost if the La Plata, Md., Chamber of Commerce declines to publicize the fact the "The Boogey Man" was shot there.

Apart from a house obviously chosen for its resemblance to the house in "The Amityville Horror," the picturesque aspects of "The Boogey Man," an absurd but proficiently grisly horror cheapie now at area theaters, have little connection with the locale.

If director Ulli Lommel has a specialty, it's sadism. Although his continuity is a tattered patchwork of devices borrowed from horror thrillers as venerable as "Dead of Night" and as recent as "Halloween" and "Alien," Lommel can make you recoil and take appalled notice at certain highlights: The heroine being dragged across the floor while bound and gagged and clad only in her undies; a murder victim simultaneously displaying bare breasts and scissors embedded in her neck; the undeniable piece de resistance -- comparable in its way to the severed head in "The Omen" -- of a teen-age couple being skewered through the mouths to achieve a literal kiss of death.The latter sensation calls for a snappier title than "The Boogey Man," which never seems justified anyway. "Kiss Kiss Stab Stab" would be more the ticket.







The terrors supposedly originate in a traumatic childhood episode, depicted in a prologue whose events and background music blatantly echo "Halloween," presumably for quick identification with the same basic target audience -- shrieking teen-age girls and their wisecracking dates. A little boy and girl are shown peeping through a living room window at a man and woman preparing to get down to lewd recreation. The woman spots the children, who are revealed to be her own. She watches approvingly as her lover binds and gags the boy as a punishment for allegedly chronic peeping.

The little girl, merely confined to her room, sneaks out of bed, picks up a large carving knife in the kitchen and cuts her brother loose. We follow two little hands clutching the knife as it goes upstairs and enters the mother's bedroom. A large rectangular wall mirror reflects the ensuing murder, in which the boy repeatedly plunges the blade into the lover's back. Shrieks and fadeout.

Fade-in 20 years later. The little girl has grown into a young wife and mother named Lacey, played by an attractive actress named Suzanna Love, who suggests a cross of Lindsay Wagner with Patty Duke (and happens to be the director's wife). Lacey lives with her husband, son and brother Willie, rendered speechless since the violent night long ago, in a large country house. r

Lacey is disturbed by the news that her disreputable mother desires to reestablish contact. As she watches the meat being carved at supper, she's all too discernibly haunted by memories of another carving knife. Sensing her discomfort, the helpful husband, an indispensable dope, insists that she confront and exorcise lingering bad memories.

He takes Lacey to a shrink-hypnotist played by John Carradine, doing the "guest star" bit that Boris Karloff used to do in Roger Corman potboilers like "The Terror." Under hypnosis, Lacey begins roaring like the demon Pazuzu in "The Exorcist." Chalk up another gratuitous crib from a hit horror movie.







Still not satisfied, the husband drives Lacey back to the original murder house, now occupied by another family but up for sale. The parents are out, but Lacey and spouse are admitted by the kids, a pair of teen-age sisters and their mischievous kid brother, smartly portrayed by David Swim. Entering the murder room, Lacey is soon terrorized by the mirror, which reflects the killing with maddening fidelity. To protect herself from its spell she shatters the glass with a handy chair.

Surpassing even himself, the husband apologizes for Lacey's rashness and then insists on gathering up the pieces and reassembling the mirror at home, the better to purge his beloved of all those frightening phantoms. One gathers that he's a whiz at jigsaw puzzles, because the jagged fragments of the mirror are back together in no time.

The remainder of the movie is wackily ratonalized by this loose connection to the haunted mirror episode from "dead of Night." In Lommel's variaton the littlest shards and slivers of the mirror are endowed with supernatural potency, luring anyone near them into deathtraps or homicidal rages.

The devices never make a sliver of sense, but they allow Lommel and his collaborators (two local filmmakers, cinematographer David Sperling and editor Terrell Tannen, were members of the crew) to assume fitfully effective attack positions. It's difficult to judge whether the payoffs would be enhanced by a more plausible or clever pretext. Probably not. The shocks might even be curiously diluted by a little preliminary sophistication. "The Boogey Man" achieves a certain vicious distinction by putting the occasional spectacular kink in an otherwise motely fabric.

'SLAP SHOT': Vulgar, Rowdy, Mixed-Up and Commercial Mischief



'SLAP SHOT': Vulgar, Rowdy, Mixed-Up and Commercial Mischief

Washington Post, The (DC) - April 1, 1977
Author: Gary Arnold

"Slap Shot," opening today at the K-B Fine Arts, reunites Paul Newman and George Roy Hill, the star-director team of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting," in a vulgar, rowdy, mixed-up commercial entertainment.

This tendentious comic fable about the comeback of a failing minor-league hockey team under the desperately mischievous leadership of Newman, cast as an aging player-coach called Reggie Dunlop, finds the star in clever, winning form while the director seems to be running a deliriously hypocritical fever.

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"Slap Shot" comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny, in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface tha makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular durnk for too long.

Hill has tried to combine a crowd pleasing style of profane, slapstick sporting humor, reminiscent of the approaches that proved popular in such movies as Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" Robert Aldrich's "The Longest Yard" and Michael Ritchie's opportunistic, ineffective gestures of social criticism, perhaps inspired by Altman's "Nashville." Although the gags and digs tend to be equally gratuitous, Hill is vastly more proficient at the former.



Luckily for the filmmakers, audiences may decline to equate themselves with the hockey fans shown clamoring for brawis and buffoonery. Alternately closnish and snobbish, a gut and turning on us for being sus-"Slap Shot" keeps inviting us to bust ceptible to the invitation.

Despite a record of success in his profession that would seem enviable to most people, George Riy Hill may crave a kind of "serious" recognition that has eluded him. Strange as it seems, the popularity of films like "Butch Cassidy" and "The Sting" may not compensate for the failure of films like "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "The Great Waldo Pepper," which Hill might have considered more personal and audacious projects.

There's strain of discontent in the movie that seems unwarranted and damaging. It's as if Hill couldn't suppress his resentment at giving public what he presumes it wants.



Shot largely on location in Johnstown, Pa., "Slap Shot" is an episodic account of the last season of the Charlestown Chiefs, a mediocre club which begins to win games and revive fan interest after adopting a pugnacious, bullying style of play. The transformation is improvised by Dunlop, who realizes that he has nothing to lose, since the management has decided to fold the franchise. Dissembling on two fronts, Dunlop provokes situations that turn the Chiefs' games into rabble-rousing free-for-alls and plants a rumor that the team may be mvoed to Florida with a bullible sports reporter.

Like their protagonist, Hill and screenwriter Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned played minor-legue hockey with the johnstown Jets, try to engineer a con, but their motives and techniques are less respectable. Dunlop's antics may make a mockery out of the games, but there's an admirable side to his deviousness: Dunlop is scheming to save the jobs of his players as well as his own job.

Newman makes DUnlop such a transparent, ingratiating deceiver, a battered, puzzled but indomitably zesful and resourceful jocks, that it's impossible to resent most of his subterfuges. The filmmakers exploit Dunlop far more questionably than he exploits the Chiefs and their followers, because they attempt to stretch the club's preposterously depicted success story into a would-be devastating sociaal parable.



Dowd's writing demonstrates certain elastic properties, but it can't be stretched to encompass a cherent or persuasive point of view.It's astonishing that the film keeps going on zany blackouts and profane zingers, but it somehow does. The filmmakers can't conceal the fact that they haven't sustained a single plot thread of relationship, yet they charge "Slap Shot" with aggressive energy.

One can detect sharper sources of conflict in the way the filmmakers treat the story and characters that in the way the characters treat each other. Initially we're led to believe that the Chiefs are folding because layoffs at the town's steel mill will inevitably kill the box office. The dubious assumption is forgotten later on. The team becomes an outrageous success, but the apathetic owner, a divosrcee played by Kathryn Walker, informs Dunlop that she's closing shop for tax purposes, on the advice of her financial advisors.

This remarkably ugly scene is orchestrated for insult. The owner patronizes Dunlop, who retaliates with a vicious parting shot, the most obsence remark in a script that goes out of its way to sound indiscreet. Dunlop returns to the locker room to grumble, "We were never anything but a rich broad's tax write-off." Why weren't the hapless Chiefs a satisfactory tax write-off? Could Dunlop have messed up by turning them into a hit? If so, why wasn't this potential irony worked imto the plot?



In a similar respect, presumably key relaionships remain unexplored. You expect scenes that will clarify the apparent conflict, between Michael Ontkean, cast as the team's smart star player, Ned Braden, and Lindsay Crouse, who plays his discontented wife. They never materialize. neither do the scenes that should develop the relationship between Dunlop and Braden, who sees through the coach's schemes from the start and refuses to play along. Even the fact that Mrs. Braden moves in with Dunlop seems inconsequential.

Dowd's writing has a peculiarly nebulous quality: It sound brassy but leaves no reverberations. Ultimately, the film seems so shallow that one can't even be certain what Braden's climactic beau geste, a striptease on the ice, is supposed o signify. If may be a gesture of ironic contempt or a gesture of ironic contempt or a gesture of whimsical resignation. For reasons that remain bafflibg, it appears to patch up his marriage.

"Slap Shot" is a joyride conducted by drivers who betray an undercurrent of hostility toward their passengers. The profanity expresses more that documentary fidelity to the vocabulary of jocks. It's an aggresive outlet for the filmmakers, too. Once you hop on, it's advisable to concentrate on the gratuitously funny aspects of the ride and to avoid taking the hostility personally.



People are more likely to be upset by the movie's dialogue sthan its split personality. Even Newman's witty acting may suffer from the fact that it's embedded in a deliberately offensive context. Newman is literally a diamond in the rough, and it requires a certain forebearance to separate his quality from the surrounding raunch.

The ultimate weakness of the film is that it's claculated to be a self-fulfilling cynical prophecy: Box-office success can be taken as justification of the assumption that moviegoers only want to play dirty. Well, not necessarily; it all depends. It is unreasonable to expect the public to feel guilty because Hill and Dowd insist on alternately stroking and slapping the hands that feed them.