Poison Pen

 

 

 

This is my second entry in the Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon, hosted by Hamlette's Soliloquy and The Midnite Drive-In

 

 

In 1987 I was in the process of deciding where I wanted to continue my search for a college degree. By that time I had been working off and on in the quest, just flagellating in my decision of what area I wanted to focus. In that aim I had (finally) decided on a degree in history. I ventured south, to San Marcos, where the Southwest Texas State University (now just Texas State University) was putting the finishing touches on a new history department building. OK, to be honest, part of my decision was finding out that the female to male ratio of students was 2:1, but hey, I was 26... what do you think influenced me more?

While I was visiting the campus, parts of it were roped off, because a film company was using portions of it to make a movie. The movie was a remake of a classic film noir movie from the 40's: D.O.A.  The new film starred Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. Unfortunately I didn't meet either of them,  (It would have been cool if the producers spotted me and asked if I would be in a scene, but that didn't happen...) But, be that as it may, seeing the movie later on the big screen was a neat thrill, since by now some of the buildings had become familiar. And it's still fun now, even 40 years later.

For instance: There is a scene early on where the Quaid character wakes up in the Ryan character's dorm room. As he leans out the dorm window, it turns out that the dorm is what was, at that time, the university library (affectionately known as "the cheese grater" by locals).

 

Also, at a later point in the film, Quaid and Ryan go to a funeral. The church where the funeral is taking place is actually the theater arts building (thus explaining it's round shape... "theater in the 'round", y'know...)

The finished film was entertaining mostly because of it's (now) home town connections (although my current residence is no longer there...)  It had been filmed mostly in nearby Austin, although it is never really stated anywhere in the film where the location is. The bar that the main character, Dex, is in when he gets poisoned is The Continental Club, whose house band is on stage, Timbuk 3. (Remember them? Their biggest hit was probably, for you, "Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades").  If you weren't familiar with any landmarks in the area you could easily suppose it was in California. Or Atlanta. Or Tampa Bay, Florida. Or some other southern US locale. (It is repeatedly emphasized how hot it is, and since this is taking place close to Christmas, you certainly wouldn't confuse it with Chicago or New York City, anyway...) BTW: a side note, that scene in the film that involves a tar pit? There is no tar pit in the Austin or San Marcos area. They built that thing for the film on the campus of St. Edward's University.  

 

 

D.O.A. (1988): 

As pointed out earlier, this is essentially a remake of the 40's classic Edmond O'Brien noir classic, so the film opens much as that older film did, with our main character, Dex Cornell (Dennis Quaid) walking the streets to his destination, the police precinct, where as it turns out he is going to report a murder, himself being the victim.

 

 

He begins by telling the police what has happened to him in the past 36 hours. It all began a day or so earlier, when he was still going about his duties. See, Dex is (or I guess now that should be was...) a professor of English. He is teaching his students, not in English, as much as I guess it was a creative writing class. One of his students, Nick (Robert Knepper), pressures Dex to give him some input on his creative writing assignment, but Dex hasn't actually read the tome that Nick wrote yet, so he brushes Nick off. 

 

 

Additionally in the class is a young student, Sydney (Meg Ryan), who obviously has a crush on her professor.  

 

 

After leaving the class he has a confrontation with a fellow professor, Corey (Jay Peterson), who is incensed that Dex passed him over and recommended another fellow professor, his friend Hal (Daniel Stern) to the dean for the next tenure slot at the university.

 

Shortly thereafter, while in his office, Nick falls to his death outside his office window. Suicide? Well, if that was all, then this would just be a straightforward drama and not a film noir...

Later, Dex has some brief confrontation with his soon to be ex-wife, Gail (Jane Kaczmarek), with whom he is still in love. 

 

 

(BTW: Just a personal note. It was a result of seeing Kaczmarek as a guest star on the TV show Big Bang Theory that inspired this blogathon. I had one of my "Hey! I know that girl!" moments. When I looked up her filmography I saw that she had been in this film, so I got with Rachel to do this blogathon just so I could review this film...) 

He goes to a bar where he ends up hooked up with his enamored student Gail. The next thing he knows he wakes up in Sydney's girls' dorm room. He overhears Sydney who is talking to her brother:

Sydney: "OK, Eddie, I give up where do the female reindeer go?"

Sydney won't explain the joke to Dex, but she does reveal that nothing happened between Dex and her because he passed out. He still feels like crap, however, but he initially thinks it's just a plain old everyday hangover. After Sydney leaves, Dex goes to the hospital where he finds out, to his horror, that he is dying from being poisoned and has less than 48 hours to live. 

 

 

Thus we get into the meat of the noir. Dex is not so willing to go gentle into that good night. (Would you?) He wants to know who the hell poisoned him. And a lot of red herrings are going to come our way as Dex stumbles around trying to get to the bottom of it all.

He becomes convinced at first that it was his ex-wife, whom he had just earlier discovered had been having an affair with his student Nick. But upon arriving at the house he witness her being murdered. Unfortunately, he only glimpses the murderer as he (or she) leaves, so like the mysterious "one-armed man" from the old TV series The Fugitive, no one believes him, especially the police.

  

  

Dex begins a long and somewhat convoluted search for his murderer. There are many missteps, as would be expected in a classic film noir outing. At one point he even suspects Sydney, since it was with her he was getting drunk at the bar and he finds out that the poison was somehow passed on to him through his drinking that night. He even pretty much kidnaps her and forces her to accompany him on his quest, even though he determines that she was not involved.   

Somehow, he determines, Nick's murder (I did say it wasn't suicide...) has some connection point. In the process of his investigations he discovers that Nick was the benefactor from a rich woman, Mrs. Fizwaring (Charlotte Rampling), who was paying for his college education. Ostensibly, the story is that his father tried to rob Mrs. Fitzwaring and her husband several years earlier. Even though Nick's father was killed after shooting her husband, Mrs. Fitzwaring was paying for his college education. 

 

 

The real reason she was doing is one of those neat little twists that you don't entirely see coming. But even that little revelation is not all of the story. Since this movie is not one of those I can assume  everyone has seen, I won't reveal how that story plays out, nor will I reveal the real reason Dex was killed, although if you are familiar with the "Macguffin" trope that was a part and parcel of many Hitchcock films, you might already have an idea of what the basic reason was, if not actually who was guilty.  That Macguffin crops up often enough it's hard to miss, even though it doesn't actually become relevant until late in the movie.

In the process to get to the end of the story, Dex finally gets Sydney to tell the rest of the joke. And it is worth the wait. "Where do the female reindeer go when Santa and the male reindeer are out delivering Christmas gifts?"

(I'll bet you're expecting me to tell you the punch line... Hah! Go watch the movie!)

D.O.A. was not a huge success, although it did manage a profit. It debuted at #3 that week, but tapered off pretty quickly. It's early success may have had more to do with the fact that it starred Quaid and Ryan, since there wasn't a heck of a lot of big name stuff out in early 1988. The biggest movies of the year didn't even start hitting the theater until that summer (this one was released in March). It got decent reviews. Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars. It has an 89% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

My opinion is that it is probably the best of the 6 (count 'em, 6!) versions of this theme, that of a guy trying to figure out who poisoned him. I admit I haven't seen all of them, particularly the recent 2022 version. A poorly received 1968 Australian version, Color Me Dead, and an equally pretty shoddy 2017 remake can't even compare, and even though I like the original, I will stand by that opinion. 

The best part of this film lies in the fact that Quaid can pull it off without over-stretching it. Which is more than I can say for Edmond O'Brien in the original. And that said with the caveat, like I say, I actually like the original. Just that sometimes O'Brien seems to be overdoing it in that one.

Come back tomorrow for the third entry in this film noir triumvirate, when I will be getting into what is often referred to as tech noir, a little film that impressed me called The Thirteenth Floor.

Drive safely, folks. And keep a watchful eye on your drinks,

Quiggy

 

 

The Back in Black Blogathon is Here!

 

 

"Film noir" has always been a favorite genre of film for me. As I have stated before several times I was introduced into the film noir world through a Steve Martin film which parodied the genre, but it inspired me to look for classics.

My friend, Rachel at Hamlette's Soliloquy, has an equal enthusiasm for this genre, so we teamed up for this blogathon. Over the next couple of days several other film noir enthusiasts will be joining us in celebrating what is often termed as "Noir-vember". Keep checking back periodically to see the great films that have been chosen. Additionally, it's not too late to join in if you have a last minute entry. Check out this link to the announcement page for the brief rules (and a definition if you don't know exactly what film noir is.) 

 

Blogathon Roll Call:

 

 

The Midnite Drive-In points out how the past never really disappears in Out of the Past. 

 

RealWeegieMidget Reviews focuses on a French couple's marriage in turmoil in La femme infidèle.

 

The Midnite Drive-In remembers hometown vibes found in D.O.A. (1988): 

 

 

Hamlette's Soliloquy shows what happens with a bunch of crooks with The Asphalt Jungle. 

 

 

Smoke in the Library covers another band of ne'er do wells in Odds Against Tomorrow. 

 

 

Bill LeFurgy gives film noir the silent treatment with The Docks of New York. 

 

 

Kristina's Speakeasy takes a look at doppelgangers with Hollow Triumph.  

 

More to come. 

 

The Past Pervades the Present

 

This is my first entry in the Back in Black Blogathon hosted by Hamlette's Soliloquy and yours truly.

 

 

The essence of "film noir", in my opinion, can be stated as I often do, as a place "where the good guys aren't all that much different than the bad guys except that the good guys have a moral compass". Think of the classic Humphrey Bogart film The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is our good guy (or "hero", if you will), but he is only the hero because the rest of the cast is peopled with such characters as Peter Lorre's greedy little twit, Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet's amoral Caspar Gutman, Elisha Cook, Jr.'s psychopathic gunsel Wilmer and even the less than scrupulous femme fatale, Bridgid played by Mary Astor. Bogart is no less likely to skirt the rules of polite society, but at least he has a sense of honor.

Film noir really got it's start in the print medium, in the pages of pulp magazines like Black Mask. The gritty rough and tumble characters that appeared in those stories eventually gave way to films in the 40's. I like the way David J. Hogan puts it in his book Film Noir FAQ: film noir "forces us to acknowledge that the presumably solid foundation upon which we base our assumptions and our very lives is temporal and dangerously unstable. It's likely to not merely shift beneath our feet, but give way completely, turning the routine of our lives upside-down and annihilating our expectations. We're plunged into a disorienting place where everything we thought {emphasis mine} we knew is wrong". 

The characters in the film noir world, often, are just "average Joes" who find themselves caught up in circumstances they were not expecting. We get characters who are normal guys (and most often they are "guys") who find out that things are not panning out right.  A detective may think he's on a run-of-the-mill case, but it turns out that, aside from being able to take on the bad guys with a reasonable amount of success, when it comes to dealing with women, his brains turn out to be on vacation and he's using a different part of his body to do the thinking. These women are what are referred to as "femme fatales" (and these, too, are most often women.)

Occasionally that pattern reverses and it's the woman who is the "average Jane" and she finds herself falling for a man who has a rather unscrupulous demeanor. (Sorry, Wrong Number would be a perfect example). And that is just a simplistic description, because the film noir world has many different scenarios. The best of them, however, can be summed up as this.

A favorite publishing house, Hard Case Crime, recently took to reprinting old pulp novels, as well as new material written in the same style. You can find many older issues of these reprints in used bookstores. I liken the stories to be akin to "film noir in print. If you'd like to investigate this, check out their website: Hard Case Crime. I recommend a few to start: The Murderer Vine by  Shepard Rifkin, Shooting Star by Robert Bloch, Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block and a recently written sequel to the aforementioned Maltese Falcon story, The Return of the Maltese Falcon by Max Allan Collins.

 

Out of the Past (1947):

 The film opens in a small out of the way town, Bridgeport, where a mysterious figure named Joe (Paul Valentine) shows up looking for Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum). Joe is looking for Bailey because, well, this guy "Bailey" is not the local gas station operator he has led people to believe he is. He has a past that he is kept hidden. (Out of the Past indeed...)

 

Joe has come looking for Jeff because a former acquaintance, Whit, wants to see him. So Jeff takes his current girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), on a road trip up to meet with Whit, and through a flashback which makes up the first half of the film, Jeff reveals his real background.

 

 

See, Jeff was originally known as Jeff Markham, and he was in the business as a private eye, along with his partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie). Jeff had met with a big time gambler named Whit (Kirk Douglas), who hired Jeff to track down his girlfriend, Kathie (Jane Greer). 

 

 

Recently Whit and Kathie had had a falling out, mainly because Kathie had shot Whit and absconded with $40,000 of Whit's money. Ostensibly, Whit wants her back (because he misses her..? Maybe...)

 

 

(Just a side note: {and this has nothing to do with the story}. At the 13:40 mark of the film, while Jeff is talking to Whit, I would swear that Kirk Douglas farts. I can't find any reference to it anywhere, but watch Douglas' expression just after the event, and you tell me...)

So Jeff goes to Mexico City, although without his partner Jack. And, of course, he easily finds his prey. And ends up following her as she transitions from there to that mecca of vice south of the border in these old films, Acapulco.

 

 

Although his task, that of bringing Kathie back to Whit, may not be so cut and dried. What complicates the matter most is that Kathie is a hot number, and Jeff begins using his other brain instead of the one God gave him for thinking. The trick, for a private detective tracking down people, is to not get involved. But Jeff breaks that cardinal rule. He gets involved, and develops an infatuation for Kathie. For Kathie's part, is she falling for him, too, or is she just stringing him along? At the beginning it could be a mutual infatuation, maybe, but keep in mind, as it later becomes evident, she knows why Jeff has made contact with her. And, though she claims to him that, yes, she shot Whit, but she didn't take the money,  

Several things happen in succession. First Whit shows up with Joe in Acapulco, but Jeff thinks he managed to brush them off with a lie that he hasn't found Kathie.  Also, Jeff's partner shows up. And Jack turns out to have less scruples than probably even Whit. He tries to blackmail Jeff, if Jeff doesn't come across with a good chunk of that $40,000. Jeff tells Jack the story that Kathie told him; she didn't have the money, so Jeff can't give Jack any part of it. But Jack doesn't believe him, and they get in a scuffle, and Kathie shoots Jack, then runs off. Jeff also discovers a little bank book she left behind that reveals she had made a deposit recently. Wanna take a guess how much was in that deposit...?

 

 

So, thus Jeff ends his story that he has been telling Ann about his past. She wonders where Kathie has gone, but Jeff tells her he doesn't know. Which brings us back to the present where Jeff is meeting up with Whit. And a surprise... Kathie is there too. At some point in the past Kathie had come back to Whit. Whit, despite the fact that Jeff had failed him on the Kathie caper, still wants Jeff to perform another job. He wants Jeff to get some incriminating evidence that a shyster lawyer has on him when he used the lawyer as a tax dodge. 

 

But that's not all, because Whit, in case it was not obvious, is a guy who never forgets anything. Nor is he the type to let bygones be bygones. He called Jeff in on this caper, not because he truly likes Jeff's reputation as a guy who plays fair. Whit has plans to even the score for the way that Jeff almost tried to cross him by planning to run away with Kathie. As such, he and Joe, as well as Kathie have set Jeff up to be framed after they have eliminated the shyster lawyer. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, since Jeff is also going to be the fall guy for killing his partner. 

 

 

(BTW, I guess I missed something. After Kathie kills Jeff's partner in the first half of the film, Jeff supposedly buries the body. But I didn't see any reveal that the found the body in the interim. So there is no proof he was killed, nor is there a body. Jack could have just disappeared... so the murder conceivably is a "moot point".) 

But Jeff smells a rat early on, and tries to throw a monkey wrench into the plans. He has his own way of getting the upper stance on the situation. There are more double crosses in this film than in a boxing match. It goes back to that thing I said early on; even though we are sympathetic for Jeff because he is ostensibly our "hero", Jeff is not so upright that he isn't willing to take chances with the law to get the upper hand. Ultimately, as bodies keep piling up, we don't really know which side of the fence Jeff is going to end up on. 

So, it should come as no surprise that, even with the love and devotion of Ann on his side, Jeff may just end up leaving with Kathie. But that too may be not so much a case of a love of Kathie, as much as she may just have the winning hand in the dealing of blackmail. 

Out of the Past is regarded as a quintessential film noir film. It ranks #23 of a list of the greatest movies in that genre on Rotten Tomatoes and holds an 88% Fresh rating on that website. It gets better reviews in retrospect than it did at the time of it's release, I guess. In 1948 James Agee wrote "Out of the Past is a medium-grade thriller", and that it was "fairly well played, and very well photographed", but that "Robert Mitchum is so very sleepily self-confident with the women that when he slopes into clinches you expect him to snore in their faces." On the other hand, more recent reviews call it the "ne plus ulta" of film noir, and it "is an exemplary noir steeped in doom and sensuality."

Wikipedia says it earned a profit of $90,000, which may not seem like much, but given that it was released in 1947, and was not the kind of film that would appeal to a wide range of film goers even at that time, I'd say that was a decent showing.

In 1984 the story was tweaked a bit, but still comes across as sort of a remake, in Against All Odds, which starred Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. Although that film did not fare as well with the public or the critics, I suggest it makes for a nice double feature that you can compare with the original.  

If you are starting out watching film noir for the first time I always recommend the Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon,  of course, but if you move on from there, you couldn't go wrong with this one as your next foray.

Drive safely, folks. And remember... your past is always with you, the best you can do is to accept it and hope that it doesn't come back to haunt you.

Quiggy

 

 

 

  

Semiquincentennial Movie Project #43: Stay Tuned

 

The Semiquincentennial  Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).

 

Week #43: Washington -

 

 

 

The state of Washington was established on November 11, 1889 

Details about Washington:

State bird: willow goldfinch

State flower: coast rhododendron

State tree: western hemlock

Additional historical trivia:

Starbucks opened it's first store in Seattle.

The world's tallest totem pole is located in Tacoma (105 feet high). 

The longest drivable beach in the country, appropriately called "Long Beach Peninsula" is in the western part of the state. 

A war between Great Britain and the United States almost started in 1889 when an American farmer shot a pig belonging to a British company.

Supposedly, more UFOs are sighted in the state than any other state (Yes, even Nevada and New Mexico...) 

Famous people born in Washington: Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Bing and Bob Crosby, Adam West, Bob Barker, Bill Gates, Frank Herbert and John Stockton.

 

 

 

Stay Tuned (1992):

 

In the tradition of such comic masterpieces like Amazon Women on the Moon (whose foray into skewering the TV culture is tough to top, but this came close) we get Stay Tuned.

Think of it as what would happen if "Beetlejuice" had been called in to haunt a TV studio and had been given the chance to do the programming of the next year's lineup. There are a LOT of references to culture icons of cinema and TV (relative to 1992, at least). I won't give away to too much of that aspect of it, but I will whet your appetite in this post.

Keep in mind that the whole thing hinges on the concept of a station called HTV (Hell TV). So the jokes tend to skewer popular movies and TV shows with a (humorously) Satanic ring. And you would be doing yourself a great disservice if you let your attention lapse for more than about a minute. You don't want to miss such classic evil adaptions of (then more current) movie releases, such as "Driving Over Miss Daisy" or a scene where the main character gets caught up in a evil version of a hockey movie (where he is opposing the Devil's team, but his co-team consists of players named "Hope" "Faith" and "Love".

The whole movie kicks of with a husband and wife named Seidenbaum (played by Bob Dishy and Joyce Gordon, familiar faces to some of you, probably) who get a visit from a mysterious character offering them the deal of a lifetime for the TV addict couple, (which is not so great a deal as advertised...) This is just the come-on before the opening credits, however.

The main film centers around a doofus named Roy Knable (John Ritter), who apparently spends most of his day just watching TV. His wife, Helen (Pam Dawber). is of course none too thrilled with having a slacker for a husband (although he supposedly holds down a job, but he isn't very good at it). Helen may or may not be the actual breadwinner in the family.  

 

They have two kids, Diane (Heather McComb) and Danny (David Tom), who are at least entrenched enough to realize that Dad is not too dependable.

 

Roy meets up with a character named Spike (Jeffrey Jones), the same guy who made the deal with the Seidenbaums earlier. He offers Roy a high tech TV set up, including a HUGE satellite dish from Hell (and not just in size, it turns out...), as well as a fancy new TV. He offers Roy the services of the TV and satellite on a "trial" basis, guaranteed to get 666 channels. (Yeah. 666 channels... Apparently Roy never once cracked open a Bible, much less set foot in a church...)  

 

 

So, in case it isn't obvious, Spike is not from this realm. No, he isn't actually the Supreme Evil dude himself, he's just a subordinate.  But he's come up with this idea to entice more souls into the netherworld. His ingenious plot involves putting the victims through a series of deadly scenarios. All for the entertainment of the Devil himself, who is apparently a TV addict in his own right. The Devil himself never makes an appearance in the film; he's busy downstairs in the den watching Spike's programming.

The ultimate thing is that these victims that Spike pulls in basically have to survive through the trials for a period of 24 hours. If they die during that time they become permanent residents of Hell. But if they survive, they are released. That whole scenario hinges on a supposed deal, I guess somewhat like the Biblical story of Job, where God allows the Devil to mess with people, but the Devil has to play by some kind of rules where he has to give them a chance to redeem themselves. (Probably this plot won't set too well with my fundamentalist Christian readers...)

See, as part of the process, Roy and Helen get sucked into the satellite dish where they find themselves, alternately, going up against a pair of nasty wrestlers called "The Gorgons".

 

Or, in another in which they are transposed as a pair of animated mice fending off an animated  robotic cat.

 

And another, a TV show set in the middle of the French Revolution where Roy is disguised as a female but is really a Marquis the revolutionaries are seeking to send to the guillotine (and not just to have his hair trimmed...) 

Meanwhile Danny is still stuck in the real world, where he not only has to figure out how to save Mom and Dad, but also how to convince his sister that this preposterous  event is actually taking place. And even when the 24 hour trial is up, the film is not quite over. Because Spike finds a loophole that just might make him actually come out on top in this affair after all.

 

 

As stated before, keep and eye out for the parodies, because this is actually what makes the movie worth a watch in the first place. The laugh out loud parts, for me, are the "evil" titles that reference the real movies and TV shows that will be familiar to most people watching, including a scene where Roy ends up on a sketch comedy parody of Wayne's World on the TV show "Saturday Night Dead". To give out very many more of the comedic references would be to deprive you of the entertainment of discovering them for yourselves, so I'll stop with just the ones I've already referenced. Not to fear, there are still plenty more. Be sure to stay through the credits when, as they roll, you get the schedule for the upcoming new season on HTV...

Stay Tuned was a box office bomb. It had a budget of around $15 million but only managed to pull in $12 million at the theaters, And it should come as no surprise that the critics didn't think too much of it. It currently only manages a 47% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One review, for Variety, said it is "not diabolical enough for true black comedy, too scary and violent for kids lured by its PG rating and witless in its send up of obsessive TV viewing...a picture with nothing for everybody".

Believe it or not, there have been a couple attempts to try to turn this movie into some kind of TV series. Personally, I think that would be a mistake. It has staying power for an hour and a half movie, but I doubt it would garner much of a fan base as a series. 

It's lowbrow comedy, true, but then, if you were expecting something along the lines of, say The Truman Show, then maybe you should pass. I did say it's stars were John Ritter and Jeffrey Jones, so that should have been a dead giveaway in the first place. As for myself, I found the whole thing a hoot. But as I said before, if movies like this are only good for the trash can, then come on over to my place and join me and Oscar the Grouch, because we like it there...

That wraps it up for this entry. Drive safely, folks. And word of warning, just stick with that old 18" Panasonic in your living room. The alternative might not be the pie in the sky it's made out to be.

Quiggy

 

   

 

Semiquincentennial Movie Project #42: Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County

 

The Semiquincentennial  Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).

 

Week #42: Montana -

 

 

The state of Montana was established on November 8, 1889 

Details about Montana:

State bird: western meadowlark

State flower: bitterroot

State tree: Ponderosa pine

Additional historical trivia:

You probably already know, but the famous Battle of Little Big Horn was fought in Montana. 

The first Gideon bibles, once a standard "amenity" in hotel rooms, were first placed in hotels in Montana.

A 1999 record setting hamburger was made in Saco. 17 cows gave their lives to help set the record.

Montana has a 95% high school graduation rate, the highest rate of any state.

The first woman to be elected to US Congress, Jeanette Rankin, came from Montana. Interesting side note: She won her first election before women even had the right to vote!

Famous people born in Montana: Jeanette Rankin,  Gary Cooper, Dana Carvey, Evel Knievel, Phil Jackson, Harvey Logan (Remember the knife fight scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? The other guy was Logan.) and Chet Huntley.

 

Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998): 

Just keep telling yourself: "It's only a movie. It's only a movie!" 

Actually, if you were paying attention to the movie poster, you don't need me to tell you that....

Note: Once again, images from the film are minimal, so I was unable to find anything I deemed usable to augment my post, but if you watch it you will realize that was probably not something anyone watching it bothered to attempt at any rate...

Before The Blair Witch Project, which most people would probably consider the first "found footage" movie, there was Alien Abduction. This was a made for TV film (or more realistically, a TV show) that ostensibly was supposed to be an edited version of some real film footage found at the house of what was supposedly a missing family that had "mysteriously" disappeared. The footage was of a family that had an encounter with some aliens who had landed their spacecraft nearby.

You don't really know for absolutely certain that this was a movie, however, until the end, when the credits reveal that all of the characters were credited as being played by actors whose names are unashamedly credited, such as "Benz Antoine as Matthew". For the most part the film plays out as what it supposedly is; a film of a Thanksgiving get together by the MacPherson family that is interrupted by some very strange events.

At this point I will point out that I am not sure if I even saw this when it first aired, although I am almost certain I probably did. It aired on TV in January of 1998, and in those days I didn't have much money to do anything, so I was probably watching it. Especially since the previous hour's time slot on the channel had been a documentary titled Real Vampires... Exposed! (That was not a dramatic show; that was a news program which had interviews with real people who claimed they were actually "vampires", and I vaguely remember watching that...) 

I looked up the schedule for that night on the TV Tango website. I certainly didn't watch Dawson's Creek, and likely didn't watch Home Improvement or Frasier, a couple of the other shows that aired in the same time slot. It certainly was the kind of show I would have opted for, given my predilection for alien tropes. Perhaps I did and just blotted out of my memory.

The whole thing has some of the hallmarks that would have thrown up a red flag for me that this was basically just fiction. The most laughable parts, however, are not a part of the "footage". Some of the supposed "talking heads" that are interspersed amid the broadcast are the ones that come off the most unbelievable.   

The talking heads are merely there to give this film an air of authenticity, however. The main focus is the panic that the family has as some seriously bizarre occurrences happen over the course of the film. The aliens seem to be able to do pretty much anything they want to, at will. Including making the power go off (and on), dismantling the power to any available vehicles, cause nosebleeds and burning sensations to the family, and even, apparently some mind control.

The little girl, Rosie (Katlyn Ducharme), may remind you somewhat of Carol Anne from Poltergeist. She seems to have some kind of connection with the aliens (which might be attributed to that "mind control" aspect). She definitely seems to be the most grounded of the bunch. The mother (Gillian Barber) comes off the most annoying. Her obsession with ignoring the frantic reactions of her children and their significant others, trying to get them all to just act normal, comes off as a bit grating.

I don't particularly see the point in trying to make out there is some kind of racial matter when one of the daughters finally shows up with her boyfriend, Matthew (Benz Antoine), and it turns out (horrors!) he's BLACK!!! Surely it isn't that big a deal by this point in their lives that the young girl has a predilection for the darker skinned men. But, this being 1998 (and I think it was supposed to be based on events from a much earlier time period), maybe it was a deal breaker... I can't say.  

The biggest giveaway that this is not a real film is that, before they run the credits, an addendum runs that says:

"If you have any information

regarding the whereabouts

of these people, please

contact the producers at

 

1-800-555-0022" 

 

(I probably don't need to point out to you that a "555" number is only used for movies, and there is never a "555" prefix in any real phone numbers in the US...)

 

By the way, the version I watched for this review just might not have been the original broadcast. Apparently there was some debate at the time when it was first broadcast on whether or not it was actually real, with forums cropping up on the internet (still in it's infancy where discussions were done via bulletin board chat rooms). It was only later, it seems, that the film was exposed as a hoax when people realized that Tommy was actually an actor named Kristian Ayre. It also came about during investigation by these amateur investigators that there was no one named MacPherson living in Lake County at the time the events supposedly took place. I am pretty certain, however, that the above addendum would have been included, so even THAT should have sent some more knowledgeable people into doubting mode.

 

The credits that ran after the internet broadcast reveal the hoax now, however. (Although, as I intimated above, I think those credits are a later addition. I think the original broadcast ended just after the fake phone number...)

 

Starring

 

Benz Antoine

as

Matthew

 

Kristian Ayre

as 

Tommy

 

Gillian Barber

as

Mom

 

Michael Buie

as

Brian

 

Emmanuelle Chriqui

as

Renee

 

Marya Delver

as

Melanie

 

Katlyn Ducharme

as

Rosie

 

Ingrid Kavelaars

as

Linda

 

   

Some of the actors in the film might just actually trigger a "Hey! I know that guy! (or girl...)" Pretty much everybody in it went on to have a fairly extensive resume, both before and after this film. In particular, I remember Emmanuelle Chriqui who played Lana Lang on Superman & Lois. The rest have appeared in minor (and sometimes major) roles over the years. It's not like they are entirely unknown.

Additionally, one of the executive producers was... Dick Clark! (Yes, THAT Dick Clark...) 

If you happen to take a deep dive, and watch this (it's available on YouTube), don't expect too much. The quality of the film, as would be necessary to pull off the fiction that it is a real "amateur film", is sometimes hard to deal with. Additionally, the aliens themselves don't actually appear on screen until the final minute of the film. The rest involves the sometimes over the top reactions of the characters dealing with the invasion, and their often unrealistic interactions with each other.

Still, it can be entertaining in it's own right. There is nothing here that puts this in the realm of unwatchable. But it has moments which may make you say"Really??? That's what you're going to do now???"

Until next time folks, drive safely. I would say be sure to lock your doors when you get home, but given what the aliens are able to manage to accomplish in this film, that may not be much help.

Quiggy