No.293 : Where the Red Fern Grows (2003)

Where the Red Fern Grows at the IMDb

This is our fourth ‘where’ film in a row - where will it end? Right here actually, but that’s what you get for Googling one ‘W’ word for film inspiration.

This is a Disney remake of an 1974 adaptation of the classic children’s book which I’d never heard of, before now. It had the mildest peril on record but was enjoyable family fun with just a hint of Christian values creeping in.

The film opens with aged city dweller Kris Kristofferson breaking up a back street dog fight. In truth it is a bit of woofing, but one ends up with ketchup on its leg and is saved from a good licking by the kindly Kris. We get a bit of narration as Kris tells us it has been ages since he had a dog. I hadn’t asked, but thanks for the update Kris.

We dissolve back to the Ozarks in 1933 when Kris was a young lad called Billy Coleman. Billy is of hillbilly stock and doesn’t wear shoes. He’s mad keen to get a pair of dogs so he can hunt raccoons, which are sought after for their coats which go for a high price back east.

Two local bad kids buy a choice pup that Billy had his eye on for $35. We know they are bad as they have money, slicked down hair and slag Billy for not having a dog. Billy moans to his shopkeeper grandfather who tells him that God will give him dogs but he needs to be met halfway. They never covered the dog distribution rules in my Sunday school class! Billy saves up the required $50 in double quick time, thanks to a ‘chores’ montage.

He walks the 12 miles to pick up the dogs and endures mild peril in the shape of some schoolyard bullies who slag off his bare feet. He soon makes it home and another montage sees the dogs get trained and grow to full size. More mild peril is overcome and soon Billy is at the district coon hunting championships. Can he win the day and the prize money that would allow the family to move to civilisation in Tulsa? What has the legend of the red fern, which grows between two graves, have to do with Billy and his two dogs? Eeeek!

I quite liked this mild and danger free offering. It was so damn nice you couldn’t help but enjoy it. I wasn’t so keen on the raccoon hunts with dozens of the critters chased up trees and skinned off camera. They do have the ‘no animals were harmed’ sign at the end but they can’t have enjoyed being chased all over the shop. I was glad at the end when the dogs were confronted by a mountain lion - not the tough guys now are we?!

There were a couple of familiar faces in Ned Beattie’s nice sheriff and Dabney Coleman’s even nicer shopkeeper. The only baddies were quickly seen off in what was quite a brutal manner. Don’t slag off my lack of dogs or you’ll die in a hatchet accident!

The Christian elements did permeate throughout, with songs about the lord and pleas to God that were answered. That’s all fine, but I do prefer my family schmaltz secular thanks very much Mr Disney.

If you like dogs, and don’t mind them dying at the end, then this could be the film you’ve been waiting for.

Best Bit : Nasty Kid Gets Axed  ‘W’ Rating 14/23

No.292 : Where Hands Touch (2018)

Where Hands Touch at the IMDb

Off to WW2 now in this two hour tale of genocide and racism, depicted by some thinly drawn characters in some unlikely scenarios.

The film opens with a caption reading ‘Inspired by historical events’ which lets you know it didn’t happen in the manner depicted. That’s OK, as it’s not billed as a documentary and to get in a lot of the story the writer wanted to tell you have to suspend disbelief somewhat and forgive the many unlikely coincidences.

A voice-over at the start tells us of ‘The Rhineland Bastards’ children born to Arian German women to black husbands, These bi-racial kids are an embarrassment to Hitler’s plans for genetic purity and he makes life as hard as possible for them.

One such child is Leyna, whose father was a Senegalese fighting for the French. He’s no longer on the scene and Leyna lives with her mother and white younger brother. Virtually everyone is horrible to Leyna apart from the baker who later gets shot in the crotch for his troubles. Leyna gets booted out of her school and sent to work in the factory, along side her mother.

She meets a Hitler Youth, Lutz, who is the only nice Nazi we meet. Lutz’ dad, The Ninth Doctor, is trying to sit out the war despite being a high ranking Nazi. He encourages his son to do the same but the boy is keen to fight. This doesn’t marry well with his racial tolerance and frankly his ideals are all over the shop.

After an hour of abuse Leyna’s mother gets taken to the camps and Leyna follows soon after. At the camp Leyna discovers she’s pregnant to Lutz, but as luck would have it Lutz is posted to the very same camp. As the war nears its end, Leyna’s pregnancy begins to show. Can Lutz protect her and who will protect him?

This was a good effort on a worthy subject, and it’s hard to criticise such brave intentions. But here goes. I felt the film relied a lot on coincidence. Everybody appeared where they needed to be and even after a slightly shocking ending, emboldened by some radical character shifts, another unlikely reunion in the smallest camp you’ll ever see, just made it seem less real and for crowd pleasing effect only.

The Germans were broadly drawn with Leyna getting abused every time she walked down the street. With the war at its peak it seemed strange that random soldiers were allowed to stand outside the factories just grabbing random workers - don’t you want these shells made? Abbie Cornish was great as the Mum and nailed the accent. Amandla Stenberg was less convincing in the main role of Leyna and I never felt the principals were believable as a family.

The Ninth Doctor was all over the place as the nice Nazi who goes mental at the end. Probably his Lancashire accent that did for him. The locations and costumes were good as was the concentration camp set. Not in the ‘Schindler’s List’ ball park but still believable and garnished by some pretty brutal murders.

Tonally it was a bit of a mess with characters professing love and then being right shits - even the saintly Leyna, who grasses up an escapee two minutes before being caught herself. Desperate measures for desperate times or just a nasty bit of work?

It was a quick two hours and I enjoyed it for the most part. The suspension of disbelief was a necessity as was the acceptance of some scene chewing acting, but overall this was an informative and powerful film that delivered a war time message that still resonates today.

Best Bit : Look at my Jazz mags  'W' Rating 16/23

No.197 : Wholly Moses (1980)

Wholly Moses at the IMDb

Dudley Moore stars in this alleged religious comedy that boasts a few star cameos but lacks any laughs whatsoever.

We open with a bus tour of the Holy Land with Moore recovering from recent heartbreak. He talks to a girl and helps find her hat when it blows off. Needless to say it blows into a cave and they find a lost gospel - ‘The Book of Herschel’. As luck would have it Moore is an expert in ancient languages and as he reads the script we dissolve into the past where his words are acted out. All that in the first five minutes - we’re not talking a bout a slow burning labyrinth plot here!

The first bible tale to be lampooned is a lift from ‘Life of Brian’ with Hershel almost having the life that Moses had. As baby Moses is set adrift on his boat made from reeds another child is similarly dispatched. While Moses is found by a princess Hershel is brought up by a family nearby with his own father acting a a slave so he can keep watch. Not surprisingly the baby grows up to be Dudley Moore - the man has range! - and he haplessly finds his way up the social order. In one massively familiar scene a group of conspirators say ‘we need a real idiot to do the job’ just as Moore sticks his head through the curtains. We all saw that one coming! I think it was even old in biblical times!

What follows are risible scenes where Moore, as the Royal Astronomer, talks at length with a jive talking pharaoh who for some reason is a black teenager. He also acts as food tester but sadly the poison is not present. He later survives a massive battle with literally several troops on either side. The disconnected scenes are interlinked by Moore’s tiresome narration and the whole enterprise seems solely geared to shoehorning in as many B list celebrities as possible - oh look there’s Dom Deluise.

Wee Dud is then cast out into the desert and soon gets a job as a shepherd. He meets a beautiful girl - it’s her from the bus! - and is annoyed at having to keep up with the Moseses. His big chance comes when he stumbles across Moses getting his instructions from the burning bush and thinks the mission is for him. He sets off to Egypt to free the slaves and starts to believe he can perform miracles due to other unrelated events such as thinking he can part waters due to a dam being built upstream. If it started bad it gets worse as the curing of the unwilling beggar from ‘Life of Brian’ is performed in full.

As Dud nears the end of the ancient script you have to wonder why his agent didn’t throw the movie version straight in the bin. It’s not just that it totally unoriginal and devoid of any wit or merit it’s just so lazy and obvious that it’d be an insult to an ‘The Only Way is Essex’ viewer. Dudley has never laid claim to being a great actor but he’s basically just himself in both timelines. This can be funny if it’s a big and engaging personality but he’s not funny and can’t carry a small bucket never mind the whole film.

The script is appalling with loads of bible references piled up alongside jokes on the ass = bottom scale of funniness. The production values are also poor with California ‘doubling’ for the Holy Land. This is done with a couple of matte paintings and some costumes that look like they’ll be due back at the fancy dress shop by 5pm.

As you may have gathered ‘Wholly Moses’ was a god-awful mess and perhaps God should have rested on the day this was excreted out too. © Spinal tap.

Best Bit : The orgy of soddom was remarkably tame but we’ll take what we can get. 7/21

No.194 : What Just Happened (2008)

What Just Happened at the IMDb

Another title missing some punctuation now as Hollywood has a good old laugh at itself - but are the viewers invited?

Robert De Niro stars as Ben, an A-list Hollywood producer who has problems piling up, both business and domestic. His new film ‘Fiercely’ starring Sean Penn has tested badly, mainly due to a dog being shot, and his English director is not keen on a re-cut. The studio boss, Catherine Keener, who was so nice to that virgin, is ready to take her scissors to the film while the director is about to fall off the wagon, a week short of his anniversary cake.

Meanwhile Ben’s next production is also sailing choppy waters as Bruce Willis is refusing to cut off his luxurious beard therefore losing his sex appeal and the studio’s support. Ben tries to get Willis’ agent John Turturro to rein in his star but he’s too much of a pussy to confront his biggest client. If that weren’t enough screenwriter Stanley Tucci may be shagging Ben’s ex-wife and an agent who recently killed himself may have been messing with his daughter, Kristen Stewart. It all sounds like some implausible bad movie!

The film opens as Ben takes his place at a Vanity Fair photo shot celebrating the most powerful producers in Hollywood. We have the familiar narrative device of some narration from the lead before we dissolve into the previous week’s events which are helpfully captioned ‘Monday’, ‘Tuesday’ etc. - a bit like my underpants.

Things start badly for Ben as his test screening elicits comment cards with less than complementary statements and indeed diagrams showing how much the film displeased the audience. Ben then has to smooth things out with the star, director and studio head in scenes unique to anyone who has never seen another film about the Hollywood system. In truth there are a few laughs especially with the OTT English director, played with a terrible accent by the Canadian Michael Wincott. Keener is good too as the studio head who is happy to take calls while on the throne but she was a bit too nice to convince as a heartless bitch, ready to spike any project that failed to meet her standards.

The second plot about Willis’ beard was less successful as it didn’t convince at all. I know it was meant to be an extreme perversion of reality, but at no point did Willis seem anything other than himself hamming it up. Away from the studio the home life stuff such as the running the kids to school and trying to get back with the ex-wife were a bit dull and I wasn’t really invested at all. I suppose when he’s getting easy sex from horny starlets it’s hard to be too sympathetic!

As the film played towards the Vanity Fair shoot where we joined the action not much had changed and I guess this was the intention of this ‘week in the life’ movie - it’s just always this crazy in Hollywood folks!

DeNiro is as likeable as always but you got the impression this was something cobbled together when he and a few pals found some time in their diaries - no doubt the Cannes scenes also matched their promotional schedules. It wasn’t too self indulgent however and the running time was kept at a bearable 90 minutes.

There are obvious comparisons to be made with ’The Player’ but it falls short of that in terms of humour and depth and is far below, on both counts, my favourite ’inside Hollywood’ flick ’The Big Picture’. Watch that instead - it’s got David St Hubbins in it.

Best Bit - Rob gets a reminder of the forgotten night before.  W Score 16/23

No.192 : Witness to the Mob (1998)

Witness to the Mob at the IMDb

 More TV movie true crime now as the merit free life story of  mob underling Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano gets the ‘Goodfellas-lite’ treatment.

We open in the present day as the orange jump-suited Sammy considers his life having spent the last decade behind bars. In a familiar narrative style we dissolve back to his youth and chart his progress through the ranks of the New York mafia. We occasionally revisit Sammy in the present day and we are treated to his voice-over throughout as he makes obvious observations and ridiculous statements to justify his worthless existence.

The flashback opens with Sammy’s hair a few shades darker, but he’s still as fat. He’s hanging about with Christopher out of ‘The Sopranos’ and trying to make an impression on the local boss. He gets some tips from the Library Detective off ‘Seinfeld’ and carries out a blood free hit on a man sitting in the front of his car. The film’s TV movie credentials are clear from the off when the hit is devoid of blood and no one says ‘motherfucker’.

Soon Sammy has a girlfriend whom he impresses by re-enacting several scenes from ‘Goodfellas’ - Bobby Vincent that ain’t! In fact the whole film from its ‘rise and fall’ story-line to the narrative device of the flashback and voice-over is lifted wholesale from that much better film and although we are dealing with gangsters here, you’d have thought they’d have shown some decency and mix stuff up just a little bit, but they don’t.

The excuse would no doubt be that this is a true story and sure enough Tom Sizemore shows up as John Gotti. Our man soon ingratiates himself with the Teflon Don and they knock off the ageing boss, possibly because he’s the worst actor you’ve ever seen. Our man is number three in the mob now, wait number two; Frank off ‘The Sopranos’ has just been blown up. Soon our mans ascent to grace reaches its pinnacle and things start heading south - what mistake will land him in prison and will his life expectancy on release be equal to that of a chocolate éclair at a Weight Watchers meeting?

This was a really awful offering that has nothing to recommend it. It deals with gangsters but has no swearing, sex or real violence - why didn’t they do a Teletubbies film if they were so scared of offending people? In truth there was one splash of blood but that was a bucket full thrown over a jukebox when someone got shot in the head - very convincing.

The main trouble was the characters and the acting. There wasn’t a sympathetic person on show and although despicable people can be entertaining they won’t be with acting this bad. The cast was all the usual Italian American suspects with the role call looking like a try out for ‘The Sopranos’ which started the next year.

The lead played by Nicholas Turturro  was a strange casting choice as he’s a small fat man devoid of acting talent. Maybe this was a good match with the real life Sammy but some dramatic licence should clearly have been granted. Even familiar turns like Paulie walnuts and Frank from ‘The Sopranos’ were on poor form with Paulie especially poor on witnessing a hit - ‘Mamma Mia!’.

The production values were poor with one car explosion the extent of the budget. As the film ended I had no interest in the lives portrayed and it’s not because these were evil men; just flat and faceless ones.

Best Bit : Oh good the ‘made man’ scene he’s getting it …what?!
W Score 7/23

No.183 : World Gone Wild (1987)

World Gone Wild at the IMDb

Well here’s a first for the 100+ W Movies Quest - no not a reader, although that’d be nice - an actual request. OK it was a request borne out of vanity as the person making the request only did so as he almost shares the name of one of the characters, but we’ll take what we can get.

This dystopian action thriller is absolutely dreadful and I doubt you’d be able to find it anywhere apart from my hard drive and numerous land fill sites - but let’s have a look anyway.

The film opens with some scene setting narration. The production evidently didn’t have the cash for a scrolling paragraph so instead poor old Bruce Dern is tasked with setting the scene. It’s the late 21st century and a 75 year war has left most people dead and it hasn’t rained in 50 years. Realising their shaky premise and the abundance of clouds in the film, they add in ‘cruelly there are clouds but no rain’ - you can’t fault science like that.

After a dreadfully tacky credits sequence with the cheapest TV movie graphics and over filtered colours we get to the nub of the action. The writer has seen ‘Mad Max 2’ and thought ‘Yeah no one will notice if I steal that’ so he sets us up in a remote compound filled with people in white clothes and hair bands. He cleverly substitutes the rare resource from gasoline to water to make it all original. Anyway the school only has four books, so at least it’s an improvement from today’s education cuts - little bit of politics there, and the kids have no pencils and a teacher lacking most of her clothes.

The lesson on etiquette is interrupted when Adam Ant appears, towed by cape wearing lackeys, resplendent in his flying goggles and in a hollowed out helicopter. I ‘d say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ but clearly someone has - drugs really screw you up. Ant is playing the ridiculously named ‘Derek Abernathy’ and after spouting a lot of shite for five minutes starts shooting up all the peaceful locals along with his dead eyed henchmen. Total carnage is averted when Bruce Dern turns up and kills a bad guy by booting a hubcap into his throat - clearly he’s not a man to be messed with.

Ant crawls off with some of the settlement’s young men (Operation Yew Tree?) to brainwash them into his cult, yes that's cult, while those who remain take stock and fix their hair. They know Ant will be back and Dern sets off to town for reinforcements. The town is a hell hole with women in basques running about while dying babies are denied water. Sounds like my kinda town! After some recruiting of colourful sidekicks Dern returns to fortify the settlement and wait Ant’s next attack. Can the mismatched gang of renegades and mercenaries take on Ant’s formation bike riding team of white clad brainwashed youths? Will the inevitable explosions kick start the environment? Hell yes!

This blog has been guilty of exaggerating the awfulness of many films but I defy anyone to see this and declare it even a partial success. Well OK, pished up students may be able to laugh ironically at the many plot holes, dreadful acting and atrocious dialogue, but we’re a bit higher brow at this blog.

For a start where, in a world with no rain for 50 years, do they find an endless supply of brilliant white clothes, never mind endless bullets and enough TNT to make 9/11 look like a box of Aldi fireworks? For a world scrabbling in the dirt to survive everyone looks well nourished and there is frankly an over abundance of motorcycles and capes.

OK, we can set these gripes aside, as long as the cast is strong and the plot is tight and coherent. Er, sorry. Ant fails to stand and deliver in the acting stakes and it is baffling how he managed to get through the audition. To be fair in a film where “Does Pinocchio have a wooden dick?” is the best line, the standards were never going to be high. Bruce Dern fails to deliver his usual mania and he seems largely disinterested in a film that doubtlessly looked more fun in the script than in reality.

The gang of misfits were uniformly dreadful from ‘Nitro’ the dynamite expert to some other guy who created a ‘snake pit’ trap with precisely 4 small snakes in it - at least they squashed them together for the close up
shot - Indiana Jones this was not.

The plot was virtually non-existent and they even had two goes at the finale both of which failed to elicit any excitement or tension. Ant had one of the lowest key demises of any movie baddie despite being seemingly bullet proof for the first 90 minutes. The big conclusion was ridiculous as it was predictable and frankly if the new rains had washed this effort out of existence no one would be complaining. Well apart from Mr Abernethy at any rate…

W Rating 6/23
Best Bit - Ant ain't no Goody Two Shoes