The Wild Party (1975)

The Wild Party (1975)

Directed by: James Ivory

Starring: James Coco, Raquel Welch, Perry King

Apparently this film is loosely based on “the Fatty Arbuckle scandal”, which was a real event. Since I am not up on my 1920’s Hollywood gossip, I did not know such a thing existed. I mean, how was I supposed to know that Caligula was actually about something that happened in the 20’s? Wait, I mean, The Wild Party. That’s right, I got confused. Hundreds of naked people look the same, no matter what time period it’s supposed to take place in.

James Coco plays an aging silent film comedian who’s career has been in a downward spiral ever since sound films came out. He’s made one last film, and he’s throwing a hell of a party to celebrate it. The party is… well, “wild” is certainly a good word for it. Everyone’s doing every drug and having sex with everybody else, and Coco manages to accidentally kill his mistress and her boyfriend, AND get caught making sexual advances to a minor.

For me, a wild party involves Groucho glasses and a “host your own mystery” board game, so there wasn’t really a lot of common ground I could find with this film. Beside that, it’s just put together really weirdly. They’re constantly switching between mania and depression, and they do it so often and so quickly that by the halfway point of the film, no scene has any emotional charge to it one way or another anymore, it just feels like watching a big beige blob of a film of horrible things happening in front of you.

Instant Karma (1990)

Instant Karma (1990)

Directed by: Roderick Taylor

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Annette Sinclair, Orson Bean

Oh good, another movie about a brilliantly talented writer discovering himself and becoming wiser and better for it. It should be illegal for writers to write about writers.

Our main character is the creator of an absolutely terrible hit TV cop drama, who is unsatisfied with his love life. He meets a hot young actress who is immediately into him, and the rest of the film is him trying to convince her to sleep with him. You’d think it would be easy, but not for this guy. Also, no, karma has nothing to do with the movie, instant or otherwise.

I hate everything about this movie, pretty much. All the characters are either unlikable or unrealistic to a level that they seem more like a living doll than a person, there are these intolerable navel-gazing psychiatrist sequences that make me want to murder cute puppies, and to top it all off, David Cassidy (of The Partridge Family fame) plays an annoying prima donna actor. This is a bad movie, and it doesn’t deserve the dignity of people watching it.

Split Image (1982)

Split Image (1982)

Directed by: Ted Kotcheff

Starring: Michael O’Keefe, Karen Allen, Peter Fonda

My, my, movie poster! You look so trim and thin, you must’ve lost at least half your width since I last saw you! You know, I try so hard to keep off the inches, but I just DEVOUR THE SUCCULENT SOULS OF THE INNOCENT, and it just goes straight to my thighs! Wha– Why the hell do you people allow me to write things on the internet? LOOK WHAT YOU DID!

Split Image is about a kid who gets involved with a cult thanks to a girl he likes. He gets brainwashed to hate his family, so his parents hire a crude asshole of a bounty hunter, James Woods, to get him back. Woods kidnaps the boy and they eventually break his conditioning, but he still has to go back for the girl he loves, risking his mental-well being, or even death by doing so.

There’s some decent drama in this film, and James Woods is such an unlikable character that he comes around the horn and becomes strangely likable in his own way. Really the weak link of this film is Michael O’Keefe as the protagonist, who appears to have basically the same emotional template through the whole film, he just gets more yell-ey at points.

Driving Me Crazy (1991)

Driving Me Crazy (1991)

Directed by: Jon Turteltaub

Starring: Thomas Gottschalk, Billy Dee Williams, Dom DeLuise

Oh man, I didn’t know this was Jon Turteltaub, but it makes total sense. This is one of his first films, and it shows the same bland, generic entertainment value as his later films like Cool Runnings, Phenomenon, and National Treasure.

Driving Me Crazy is about a wacky East German inventor who has created a new kind of car engine which emits oxygen and vitamins as exhaust and allows cars to go five times faster than normal. He goes to America to sell his invention, but his car is immediately stolen and ends up in the hands of Dom DeLuise. He must overcome the wacky lifestyle that we Americans have and team up with the street-wise Billy Dee Williams to get his car back and save his village from being industrialized.

You know those “stranger in a strange land” montages that every movie with a character like this have? Where it’s just some foreigner and a cool person that lives there, and the foreigner acts like a big tourist and at the end has a new, significantly worse, wardrobe? Well, the one from Driving Me Crazy is especially terrible, since it’s in the early 90’s. For the last half of the film, the protagonist is wearing a Bart Simpson shirt that says “Eat My Shorts, MAN!” Yeah…

The Kid With X-Ray Eyes (1999)

The Kid With X-Ray Eyes (1999)

Directed by: Fred Olen Ray

Starring: Justin Berfield, Robert Carradine, Diane Salinger

“Hey guys, I’ve figured it out! We can make any movie into a new kid’s movie if we just make the protagonist a kid instead of an adult! IT’S BRILLIANT! What? No, of course we don’t actually have to watch the movie we’re stealing from, do I look like I watch movies?”

The older brother from Malcolm in the Middle finds a pair of cheap plastic welding goggles one day, and– wait, no, those were x-ray glasses. My bad. Anyway, he finds these x-ray glasses which work, not like actual x-rays, but like how x-rays work in those comic book advertisements for x-ray glasses. Unfortunately, some no-goodnik crooks are after the googles for use in their devilish schemes (like… seeing through a safe or something. I dunno, I think they just wanted to look at people’s underwear, too). Will the kid and his cool beach bum uncle be able to beat the bad guys? Of course they do, and they do it in standard Home Alone fashion, in compliance with section 15B, paragraph 7 of the Homogeneous Family Film Act.

There are parts where the kid is using the goggles and we get to see it from his perspective… that whoever he’s looking at is a goofy plastic skeleton. It’s such a cheap, cartoony effect, but it was actually the part I liked the most about the film. I mean, yeah, might as well go all out as to how ridiculous this concept is, right? I don’t know if that’s how THEY approached it, but that’s how I’m going to PRETEND they did.