The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Antici... Pation!

Sometimes you hear about a movie, and it sounds really great, but you can't find a copy of it to watch. Maybe it's out of print, or maybe you just never get the opportunity. So for years, the idea of this movie ferments in your mind. You imagine scenes from it, try to reverse-engineer the story from the bits you've heard and the few stills you've seen in an old magazine. Then, one day, you finally get a chance to see the thing, and you're practically bursting with anticipation. It starts, you watch a few minutes, and then you say, "What the fuck is this shit?"

You'd think this phenomenon would have gone the way of smallpox in this age of DVD and Netflix, but I can still think of half a dozen movies that I've been wanting to see for 5 years or longer but haven't had the chance. Here's a few that I waited patiently for over the years, and the results of my waiting.

The Guns of Navarone - I had the Guns of Navarone playset when I was a kid. It was basically a plastic mountain with caves and big guns (a howitzer and an anti-aircraft gun) and came with full compliments of Yank and Kraut soldiers. I spent hours organizing campaigns with it, incorporating plot points I'd stolen from Sgt. Rock comics, and sometimes involving a plastic Godzilla in the melee, and all this stuff got worked into my idea of what the movie would be like. I mean, I knew it wouldn't have a Godzilla vs. Nazis scenario, but I was imaging the kind of wall-to-wall action film that Robert Rodriguez would have made of The Guns of Navarone. I figured it would start with a massive siege on the mountain with tanks and guns and planes, all failing to get past the deadly guns, until a small commando group broke off to enter the mountain and set off a bomb in the ammunition storage. I actually can't remember much about the movie, but I do remember being utterly disappointed by it when I finally saw it. As I recall, it was about 4 1/2 hours long, and they only got to the mountain with the guns in the last 15 minutes. I should probably give it another chance one of these days.

Destroy All Monsters - Throughout my childhood, Japanese monster movies were my biggest obsession. Every Saturday afternoon, after the cartoons ended, I'd tune in to the local Creature Feature, to be either disappointed to see the Universal globe or elated to see the Toho logo. But somehow, I always missed Destroy All Monsters. It was clearly the best of the bunch, with 9 monsters going at it, but it seemed like every time that one was on, I was out doing something. I specifically remember the time my dad took me deep sea fishing, and the whole time I was thinking "Fuck! I'm missing Destroy All Monsters AGAIN!" I was in my early 20's when I finally caught the movie on The Sci Fi Channel, and it stands as one of the most disappointing experiences of my life. I had this whole idea that the film would be stuffed with monster fights, but for most of the movie, the monsters don't fight each other at all, and when they finally do get down to it, it's eight monsters ganging up on Ghidra. Hardly a sporting fight!

Jack the Giant Killer - This one probably represents the longest time between hearing about the movie and actually seeing it. A friend told me about this movie in second grade. Well, all he really told me was something like "Jack the Giant Killer has a two-headed dragon" (which I actually don't think is even true), but it was enough to put it in my head as something I wanted to see. I misunderstood the title--Jack is a guy who kills giants, not a killer of unusually large size. I finally caught it on TCM a couple years ago, and it's just a completely lame rip-off of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, with shitty-looking monsters that look like the monsters a kid would make out of playdough after seeing the Sinbad movie.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - A local punk zine (Suburban Relapse) had scored an interview with Russ Meyer, and included a bunch of stills and background on his movies, including this one (as well as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but frankly, even I'm sick of hearing myself talk about that one). It looked pretty badass, but the local video store didn't carry it. Then I turned 18, and got access to the porn room at the back, and there it was, siting inexplicably amongst the hardcore flicks. Did anyone ever rent it thinking it would be porn? At any rate, I liked it, but on that first viewing it didn't quite live up to my feverish fantasies. Don't worry, this one grew on me over time.

Plan 9 from Outer Space - I was satisfied with this one when I got to see it, probably close to a decade after first hearing about it, but how can you really be disappointed by a movie that you're expecting to be bad? My chance to see it came when Penn and Teller hosted an all-night bad movie marathon on some cable channel. In introducing this film, Penn went off on a rant about how much he hated Merchant Ivory films.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains - I used to love watching Nightflight on the USA network back in the 80's. It was four hours of...well, you never knew what it was going to be. Sometimes videos that didn't get shown on MTV, sometimes weird cult movies, sometimes Japanese sci-fi shows with funny dialogue dubbed in. One of the movies that they always showed was this story of an all-girl punk band starring Diane Lane and Laura Dern, and, like Destroy All Monsters, I managed to miss it every time it was on. It was a very different film than I had imagined, one that took itself more seriously than I expected, but that was in no way a bad thing. This is maybe the best kind of movie experience, when something you've been hoping for turns out to be something just a little bit unexpected, and it's the kind of experience that keeps me working on checking films off my list.