Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Any Gun Can Play!

Theme: Desperado - Alice Cooper

Spoilers all the way.

Ever see a western actually do the tumbleweed from cartoons? You have now.

Any Gun Can Play has my new favourite movie opening: three strangers ride into town. One is clearly meant to look like Clint Eastwood's Dollars character, another like Lee Van Cleef's (the third doesn't look anything like Eli Wallach but what are you gonna do?). They're hyped up with a succession of low angles and dramatic zooms into the frightened faces of townsfolk observing from their windows. This goes on for a few minutes.

The undertakers in these flicks must live like kings.

Then they're suddenly killed by our surprise protagonist (George Hilton), who will be known henceforth as Stranger, which he tells us people call him, for he is too autistic to realise it's not a cool nickname; they just don't know who the fuck he is. Anyway, Stranger merking Sergio Leone's protags in effigy is the most hilariously spiteful way to ring in a movie since For Your Eyes Only, and is such a characteristically Mediterranean display of audacity that it makes me grin like a deranged retard (more).

"Psshh...nothin personnel...kid..." - actual dialogue.

What makes this act of celluloid effrontery funnier still is that Gun rips off the Good the Bad and the Ugly formula so blatantly, like Enzo G. Castellari (of whom, needless to say, you have not heard) was telling Leone, "hey, nice template, kid, but seriously, this is how it's done". The fact the rest of Castellari's ouevre is Z-schlock like The New Barbarians makes this bravado more impudent still, which warms the single cockle of my walnut-sized heart. Never let it be said that Patrick H. Bastard does not root compulsively for the underdog.

He also made The Bronx Warriors, starring my mutuals racially diverse neonazis as its heroes. Based? Pozzed? Who even knows anymore?

Yet, while immediate followup One Dollar Too Many lapsed too hard into slapstick silliness, Gun maintains an excellent heightened tone, making surrealistic genre satire with a straight face, like Twin Peaks or the early Bondkinos. It transcends the obvious and breaches that dream-realm of normative cinéma where neckbeards never reach. Sure, Gun is a spaghetti western satire, but, like Scream, it still feels like a real movie, which today's bathos-peddlers can never achieve (yeah, I'm talking about you, Rian Johnson).

Real movies look like this.

Any Gun Can Play also stars Gilbert Roland as bandido Monetero, beside flagrantly Italian hottie Stefania Careddu, billed as Kareen O'Hara, as his Mexican moll (????).

"¿Faith and begorrah, gringo, where's me lucky charms? ¡Viva la raza! ¡Andale!" - Kareen O'Hara.

Together with Edd Byrnes' defector from finance, these form the amoral triad/quadrangle that will variously team up and backstab one another for a haul of cash, leaving about 250,000 incidental goons dead in their wake. Since everyone in this movie is just as bad as everyone else, you're refreshingly free to choose who, if anyone, to root for, but Stranger alone is graced with an opening title theme song in the vein of classic westerns like 3:10 to Yuma but, I suspect, more directly inspired by the grandiose themes from James Bond kinos like Thunderball.

It even plays over a train montage, compounding the tism allegations. One of us! One of us!

The only thing that makes this arguably not by far the GOAT spaghetti western is the unaccountable absence of Morricone music, but I won't dock it a star because you'll come away from it humming his Dollars scores anyway. Is that a fair way to rate movies? Who cares? Watch Any Gun Can Play, you stupid fucking asshole.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Shack Out on 101!

Theme: Red Sharks - Crimson Glory

Even though 99% of movies are to the left of Lenin and always were, disingenuous dorks still wail and sob over the small and undistinguished run of low-budget anti-commie B-joints in the late 40s and 50s, most inexplicably infamous of which is guaranteed sleeping aid Woman on Pier 13, AKA I Married a Communist. Fortunately there was one kino noir in the set, which shares an oneiric oceanic opening motif with the 50s' best noir of all, Screaming Mimi:

The setting also reminds me of Tormented!. For some reason pairing curvy hotties with west coast beaches was a popular way to open 10/10 kinographs in the late 50s.

Terry Moore stars as Kotty, the waitress at a coastal diner whose unhappy lot consists in fending off the advances of rapey slimeball Slob (Lee Marvin) and the diner regulars. Sure, she could easily become the country's top model or movie star, or just marry any man with money, but shhh, if we pull on that thread they'll stop casting Sydney Sweeney in movies I'm never going to see too. Much of the runtime is actually chewed up in Clerksian vignettes of workplace banter and shenanigans, such as these two trying out scuba gear in the empty diner:

Movies could have been so good, you know.

But then the plot kicks in and the suspense begins to rise: IS everyone around our Ter Ter what they seem? WHOM can she trust, if anyone? WHO will survive, and WHAT will be left of them? Oh wait, that's the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally the second best tagline of all time, after A Nightmare on Elm Street's "if Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all!". CAN you remember a tagline from any post-80s movie? I can't.

Too soon?

There's just one other thing about this kino that makes it still relevant, though I imagine it's entirely incidental. There's no actual mention of communism, the USSR or any other specific identity for the enemy faction soliciting nuclear secrets from our cast of shifty fuckers, which makes one wonder whether some other foreign interest might just as well be behind it all. For obvious reasons, it's not a double meaning H*llywood would ever knowingly let slip into a movie, but it's grimly lulzy to consider all the same.

The way she then turned to camera and said "yeah, I'm talking about you, Ben Shapiro" was really ahead of its time.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Jawbreaker!

Theme: Candy Pop - LEN

One million years ago I came up with a movie pitch that was essentially Mean Girls meets The Death of Stalin, which, of course, I called The Death of Stacy (w/t DONUT STEEL).

This is a parody edit I made from some tumblrcore feminist agitslop, which only makes it funnier.

I even wrote a first draft of a short screenplay, but never really cared for it enough to bother with a second. Fortunately, someone or other in the 90s had the same basic insight: that clique flicks must be structured like mob movies. Jawbreaker is basically a Scarface or Goodfellasesque rise-and-fall narrative set within the shiny halls of that familiar celluloid vista, 25-y/o High.

Trooning out solely so I can go into the girls' bathroom and make cat noises obnoxiously as they beef.

Scream's Rose McGowan plays the usurping Casey whose prank kidnapping of alpha queen Stacy Charlotte Ayana cuts short her reign and life, leaving McGowan presumptive leader of the pack. Sycophantic Macy Julie Benz has her back but conscience-addled Laci Rebecca Gayheart (Urban Legend) wants out, which incurs the ostracism of the newly crowned Stacy (no, they don't actually have rhyming names, like in my screenplay, but they should).

#relatable #justgirlthings #xoxo

Yet the coverup is jeopardised by incidental witness Becky (not her name either) (Judy Greer), who Rose McGowan buys off with a Faustian offer of popularity. But will the new Casey get too big for her designer heels? Will there be tears, recriminations, character assassinations, catfights, double-crosses, sass and sabotage? Of course, but, better still, there's heightened art direction that makes everything you've ever seen look phoned in.

Round shapes as of the titular candy haunt the characters' headspace...

Hang like an albatross around their necks...

Or loom overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Here, the Jawbreaker (1999) looks like the planet from Eraserhead...

"I've seen Blue Velvet too!" - director

Oh, don't mistake me, this is 100% a Stacy-bashing high school angst revenge fantasy. The director clearly favours the gay-theatre-kid and tryhard-scenester side characters, wilfully blind to the fact they're every bit as cliquey and bitchy as the very meanest hot girls IRL. The name of the school, Reagan High, also speaks to soybitch resentment (yeah, I hate Reagan too, but for based and redpilled reasons. Hollywood libs hate him because they think he was good).

"Classic Americana MUST be rotten with hypocrisy, otherwise I'd be the one who's wrong, and that's impossible" - Cope & Seethe, Attorneys at Law.

But, like all mob movies, they can't help but make their villain protags look cool, making Jawbreaker as hard a self-own as Starship Troopers and The Joker. The reason rappers see Scarface not as a cautionary tale but as a wish fulfilment fantasy isn't despite Tony's violent downfall, but because of it: going down in flames at the height of your glory is part of the dream; to burn out, not to fade away. No one wants any less to be a cool Stacy at the head of a clique after seeing Jawbreaker. Get real!

I come not to bury Stacy, but to praise her.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kwaidan!

Theme: Transcendence - Crimson Glory

The most lavish and impressive horror production of all time actually shares something in common with video nasty Unhinged: both films are at times so languorously paced that you practically start to nod off before something jarringly frightening happens to shock you back into wakefulness. There, though, the similarity ends, because Kwaidan is more like Kurosawa's Dreams, and not just because both are Japanese anthologies, but also because they approach the Platonic form of cinéma. Entirely filmed within a huge warehouse set made up to look like all manner of locations interior and exterior, Kwaidan's constructed dream-world is as stylised and incongruous as it is hypnotically convincing. But then again, a third comparison suggests itself: like South of Heaven, Kwaidan uses obvious backdrops throughout, producing the same superreal dissonance as the painted shadows on the sets of Caligari.

No movie lends itself so hard to making those cinegrids they post on /tv/ sometimes.

Kwaidan is set variously in periods of Japanese history I couldn't possibly name or profess any knowledge of at all, and seems to be based on traditional folklore of that most obsessed-over country. Some instalments are quite straightforward morality plays in which a protagonist's pride or folly leads him to some paranormal ruin, while others are more whimsical, even comical ghost tales with cryptic or file-not-found meanings, but the three-hour whole runs entirely on atmosphere. Its ghostly apparitions probably seem spookier to western audiences with no frame of reference for why they take the forms they do or what the fuck is going on half the time, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? Moreover, Kwaidan features the best battle sequence of all time of the week, and probably the best naval battle ever filmed:

You guys, I think I'm a weeaboo now.

I think it's fair to say that Kwaidan is every bit as objectively the best horrorkino as The Road Warrior is the best actionkino or Apocalypse Now the best warkino*. You could compile a more-or-less objective top ten (or so) just by taking those GOATs from each genre, and it would be both more interesting to read and far more fun to watch than all those lists with Citizen Kane at the top you always see. But then, your list should be your list, which is to say it should be my list, because you have all the discerning taste of a village idiot. Watch Kwaidan.

*The theatrical cut, of course; French plantation scene apologists go back to r/criterion and kys.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Chopping Mall!

Theme: Mallrats - Wax

Don't be disappointed that the best parody slasher movie title you could wish for was bestowed upon a movie with no masked killer, nor any chopping to speak of; rather, be thankful that it was bestowed upon the 80s' greatest killer robot and exploding head kino, which thereby mogs into irrelevancy Terminator and Scanners at a single stroke.

Sadly, my DVD boasts a resolution of 1p, which is so low it doesn't even exist.

Besides this hapless young lady (Suzee Slater, spelled like that), Mall stars such A-list artistes as John Terlesky (Deathstalker 2) and Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, From Beyond and Castle Freak). The plot is simple, in the euphemism-for-retarded sense: the owners of a mall replace Paul Blart Mall Blart with killer robots. Shenanigans ensue when horny redshirts* get stuck in the mall overnight and are hunted by the killer robots, which malfunction by using their deadly weapons to kill people! I have the same problem with my garage door remote all the time.

The sensible tank treads and low centre of gravity make them much harder to knock down than goofy bipedal killer robots. One does get upended at one point but it has an inbuilt jack for righting itself. They thought of everything, except not having them sped out and kill people.

In the top ten robots of entertainment, I rank the Paul Bot Mall Cops third only to Robby from Forbidden Planet and Robert from Fireball XL5. The fact I can't even remember any other cool robots should do little to minimise the pedigree of this auspicious distinction.

Actually, now I think of it, these guys from the Star Wars prequels were kino af and probably the coolest-looking things in that entire franchise.

But our heroes don't go down without a fight, and much fun is had with them looting stores for props and weapons to use against the robots. The enclosed nature of the mall setting would make it close to a Die Hard ripoff as well, only it predates Die Hard by a year (though, fun fact, the Die Hard script was in development hell for so long it was originally set to star Frank Sinatra). Not only should you watch Chopping Mall, but you should write to the studios and castigate them for their stupidity and worthlessness in failing to produce kinos of this calibre on a regular basis**. The continental United States is now filled with abandoned malls; chop chop!

Average mall in 2025 (colourised).

*Several characters are waitresses employed at the mall who wear a red uniform, which is possibly deliberate Star Trekian foreshadowing of doom, but then again possibly not.

**And for all the rape.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Creature from the Black Lagoon!

Theme: Dragon's Child - Iced Earth

The Universal classic monster movies have been more endearing than unnerving since about 1950 at the latest. I can't tell you late entry Creature from the Black Lagoon is any exception, but it's my favourite and the best regardless. The design of the titular Creature, more often referred to as the Gillman, is so GOATed it makes me unreasonably mad that Universal didn't make more horrors based on original treatments over the well-worn sources of Victorian novels and folklore.

The Gillman rocks 16-pack abs. Personal trainers HATE him. What's his secret? Click to find out!

Creature dropped in 3D back when that was cool (1954, and not a year later). While 3D would become synonymous with B-joint schlock and, worse, Avatar (2009), in 1954 it inspired a more kino grandiosity. You don't open a picture much bigger than this:

Based.

We then flash forward a bunch to the 50s, when the good ship Rita explores the waters of the Amazon, where dwells the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)! Tormented!'s Richard Carlson leads the cast beside Julia Adams, who becomes the locus of the Gillman's foreveralone affections. In a curiously poignant sequence, he observes her from below in the act of not-quite-synchronised swimming:

Fortunately Julia at no point looks down, prompting you to wonder who's just out of your own field of vision right now and for the next few weeks.

The most hilariously dated aspect of this movie is the Creature's bombastic leitmotif, which goes (and this is highly technical musical notation) "Dahn-dahn-DAAHN, dahn-dahn-DAAHN", etc. whenever the Creature or, more often (likely to spare the stuntman who played him donning the entire elaborate kit all the time), his hand appears.

I'm tempted to make an Airplane!esque parody in which he reaches through people's windows to grab popcorn and stuff, yelling "dahn-dahn-DAAHN" the entire time.

I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to make a proper R-rated horror remake of Creature that was actually scary. Images like his webbed footprints in the sand seem like they would lend themselves well to found footage, if anyone still makes those, though with the coolness of the costume maybe you'd want proper camerawork and lighting to show it off to its best effect.

Working title: The Black Lagoon Project OC DO NAHT STEAL

Like Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature's story was redundantly extended through two sequels, neither of which are particularly essential viewing and, given that they extend his streak of striking out with human women, seem a bit like piling on. My version would give the Gillman the happy ending he deserves: after being arrested for mauling the explorers who rudely interrupt his daily swim, Ol' Gil is sentenced to life in Seaworld (this is more or less the plot of the second one, if memory serves), but his trainer (Sidney Sweeney) is won over by his amphibious charm and they escape together on the back of that orca from Free Willy, then kill and eat it because fuck orcas, they murder seals for fun.

Gamers rise up.