DVD Reviews
As a movie, no, The Creature from Black Lake is no great shakes. As a Bigfoot movie, though, it's better than most. Every one of us who saw it in the theaters when we were 10 will agree that it scared the shit out of us. Of course, most all the Bigfoot movies did back then.
It was released in 1976, three years after The Legend of Boggy Creek, but perfectly timed to cash in on the last hurrah of the nation's Bigfoot hysteria. Elam plays Joe, a trapper who's spent most of his life in the Louisiana swamps. When something drags his buddy out of the boat one day, rumors begin to spread. Could it be the nefarious doings of the legendary Sasquatchian man-beast who's said to roam those parts?
Could be!
But of course nobody much wants to admit it-after all, ol' Joe's just a crazy drunk.
Enter a couple of anthropology students from the University of Chicago. They're loaded down with cameras and equipment, determined to find out the truth.
The locals don't want to talk about it, and the sheriff (in good movie-sheriff fashion) tells them to forget about it and go home. Dub Taylor begins telling them about his encounters with the creature, until a breach of etiquette forces him to throw the boys out of his house. Undaunted, the two go slogging off into the swamps where they hope to find some real evidence that the creature exists.
Director Joy Houck, Jr. made Night of the Strangler and Night of Bloody Horror before this (and interestingly enough, produced a fake Boggy Creek sequel in the mid-80s). The fact that he came to this project with no budget ends up, as happens sometimes, giving the film an edge of believability. It's not presented as a documentary the way Boggy Creek was, but still has a documentary feel about it-and Houck was wise enough to keep the guy in the monkey suit hidden through most of the film. The only major disappointment is the lack of screen time for either Taylor or Elam. Still, even given only a few brief scenes each, both men do a masterful job. Across the board, actually, the acting and the script are more nuanced than you'd expect in a Bigfoot movie, the ending surprisingly violent. It's perfect viewing from within the confines of a cushion fort.
-Jim Knipfel
Journeying across time, from Napoleon to Robin Hood to the Titanic, the crew searches for treasure, meets various historical personages and battles the forces of ultimate evil. All in a day's work, I guess. Napoleon (Ian Holm) is a petty dictator more interested in puppet shows than the war he is fighting; Robin Hood (John Cleese) is a wholesome type surrounded by a medieval biker gang of toughs and King Agamemnon (Sean Connery), when pressed by Kevin to teach him sword-fighting techniques, offers him a more socially useful skill: three-card monte.
Gilliam, having come from the merry crew of Monty Python pranksters (for whom he co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life), crafted a middle ground here between his Python roots and his future interest in dystopia, fantasy dreamscapes and the life of the outsider. There are moments of Python-esque humor, as with the feckless couple, continually interrupted in their romantic interludes by the time travelers, and the bitter, brittle villain's tendency to turn his underlings into barnyard animals. Famed Shakespearean Sir Ralph Richardson makes a guest appearance as God, playing Him as a colonial overseer, docking his misbehaving minions with a 19 percent cut in salary, predated to the beginning of time.
Gilliam also indulges his taste for irruptions of history, particularly a love of all things French, and Great War drama (the mustard gas here, similar to the WWI battle scene in 12 Monkeys). In Gilliam's feverish imagination, history is placed in a blender on high, and the emerging puree of great men and famous moments is the sea through which his film's ship sails. Now wouldn't it be something truly amazing if Gilliam (or any other filmmaker) had skipped right past the Napoleons and Robin Hoods, and shown us a contemporary of ours going back into the past as experienced by the common man and woman? Time Bandits, while highly entertaining, is in love with the idea of history, but not the living fabric of it.
-Saul Austerlitz
Antonioni's subject was perfect-photography (and implicitly, cinema). His storyline explored just how much the eye can see. A fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who has demonstrated no social awareness happens upon a murder in a public park and takes several snapshots of it. Curiosity, sexual temptation, death threats and anxiety result. Through this dilemma, Antonioni-through his innately existential compositions-addresses our moral responsibility. Blow-Up inquires into the meaning of life as one witnesses it and the consequences of modern life as one participates in it. Antonioni doesn't separate the two circumstances. That's what gives the movie its uniqueness. An enraptured viewer does not distinguish between watching a movie that is a suspense thriller and one that is also a visually ravishing essay on the esthetics of photography, the morality of seeing. Barthes and Susan Sontag spent the next decades responding to Antonioni's thesis.
Regular moviegoers were also intrigued-and still are. That Antonioni's great sensibility resulted in a (surprise) hit has given Blow-Up its place in history. It was part of that phenomenal historical moment when average audiences would sit still for a movie that heightened their perception, that challenged their thinking.
Sex is certainly a part of it. Blow-Up was known for its brief views of pubic hair, as well as the scene of Vanessa Redgrave, in unisex dress, barely covering her breast, and Hemmings doing a brazenly orgasmic photo shoot with the model Verushka. Antonioni burst the boundaries of what movies could show, seriously bringing an erotic frankness to the screen, extending the sex scenes of his masterpiece L'Avventura. That MGM stood behind the film eventually led to the creation of the MPAA ratings board.
Blow-Up's great reputation rests primarily on the photo-development scene, where reality is enlarged and investigated until truth becomes unknowable. Antonioni took off from Hitchcock's classical mystery Rear Window and opened a window into the modernist era. His influence was seen in Coppola's The Conversation, De Palma's Greetings and Blow-Out, even Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. It's a fascinating movie on several levels. You'll never look at a movie-or a photograph-the same way again.
-Armond White
Sounds heavy-handed, but it's done with discipline. The camera keeps its distance, cuts in at key moments, then steps away. So when Lupino kills in cold blood, there's a pause on her face before her husband dies off-screen. Walsh sets these well-timed highs against a canvas of class difference and milieu. All that social realism looks anachronistic, albeit interestingly so. We get late-night truck driver banter, pestering debt collectors, sass-talking waitresses and a road spill that leaves one trucker maimed. Left at home and watched over by his wife, one scene is a poignant study of an emasculated male.
In its better moments, this has the terse tone and attention to detail of left-leaning literary journalism today. Only in the end, we see the hard-working hero make his way to the financial top. This is 30s-era liberalism, but of a wishful kind: You can have your salt of the earth and eat it.
All and all, it's worth a peek, even if the DVD extras blow. There are a handful of trailers, of course, and a 15-minute featurette that gives a little background history, plus bites from a Bogey biographer and Leonard Maltin waxing faint praise. We learn Drive by Night is based on a novel and a 1935 Bette Davis vehicle (that's Warner recycling its old scripts). What's needed is a Walsh fan like veteran critic Manny Farber, who could have zeroed in on the director's taut eye for composition and love of character. What's the point in releasing a second-rate classic if you don't give viewers food for thought?
-Julien Lapointe